Recordings from IATEFL Pronunciation SIG Online Conference 2025

Games and Gamification in pronunciation teaching: bridging theory and practice

Pronunciation teaching often focuses on helping English language learners become intelligible, i.e. ensuring they can be understood by listeners. While this remains a vital and necessary goal and should continue to be a priority in our everyday teaching, we cannot deny that sometimes real-life communication demands more from our students. In such circumstances, we have to go ‘beyond intelligibility’ in order to find the most suitable means to provide support.

But what do we mean by ‘beyond intelligibility’?

This one-day online event focused on exploring the additional factors which impact learners’ pronunciation and broader communicative competence such as the role of fluency, prosody, pragmatics, and speaker confidence. This theme also provides an opportunity to investigate finer points and dynamics such as interactional nuance, listener engagement, and emotional expression in speech.