Authors

This article presents an experiment which was aimed at determining the English Language Teaching (ELT) majors’ views on the pronunciation of a competent English teacher. The relationship among intelligibility, comprehensibility and competence was explored in order to evaluate the necessity and possibility of updating the recommendations for teaching practical phonetics as a consequence of the spread of English as a lingua franca. A questionnaire and a semi-structured interview were used in order to collect quantitative and qualitative data respectively. The results revealed that English teachers who followed the Lingua Franca Core (LFC) were judged as significantly more intelligible and comprehensible to Russian ELT majors. This result proves the efficiency of LFC-based instruction if the goal is intelligibility. Native-sounding English teachers were rated as significantly more professionally competent despite their low intelligibility and comprehensibility, which supports the native-speaker bias previously described in scientific literature. The authors conclude that it is necessary to develop a new pronunciation model for the purposes of teaching phonetics to ELT majors, which would satisfy both their needs and desires by combining the LFC basis indispensable for intelligibility, with the features of native-speaker pronunciation, linked to the image of a competent professional.

The article explores the existing linguo-didactic terms “phonetic competence”, “phonological competence”, “phonetic-phonological competence” in Russian scientific literature and defines the phenomenon within this work. The authors draw a line between phonological competence development in university students of linguistic and non-linguistic majors, as well as between productive and receptive phonological skills development considering the status of English as a lingua franca. The article reviews the main parameters of phonological competence assessment outlined in academic literature – intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness – in diachrony in order to define their relationship and suggest their translations for using in the Russian academic literature.

This article presents the results of an empirical study of learners’ needs analysis to design a potential training course to adapt teachers to work in a middle school with International Baccalaureate (IB MYP) programs. The purpose of the study was to identify learning needs as well as gaps and expectations, preferred formats, amount of time that teachers in Russian schools have available for professional development courses in IB MYP programs. Using a survey method, the study identifies learning preferences of teachers as participants in a potential course: practice orientation, attention to documentation, preferred topics and formats of work. The learning needs analysis also revealed barriers that may prevent teachers from effectively engaging in professional development, including lack of time, conceptual complexity of the material, lack of institutional support and lack of professional guidance. The Learning Needs Analysis has proven to be a convenient, relatively simple, flexible, and effective tool for subsequent course design. The authors conclude that it is versatile for courses of varying focus and duration and suggest a number of ways to make the method more useful for understanding the learning context of specific groups by adding sociometric questions.