Peter Roach_Phonostylistics

presented by Anastasia Semiokhina 201

Oxford University, Manchester University, University College London

June 30, 1943

London

&

QUOTES

biograPHY

- a British retired phonetician

Peter Roach

On his retirement in September 2003, the University of Reading awarded him the position of Emeritus Professor of Phonetics.

MUSE

the principal editor in 1997

published in 1983

best-known publications

You mention that you love long-distance running. Have you ever run a marathon?

"Yes, I’ve run about a dozen, including London three times. My big ambition was always to break the three-hour barrier, but the closest I got was 3h 7mins. Great result I should say!"

What was the hardest part of writing ‘English Phonetics and Phonology’ and what part of the book took you the longest to write?

‘Intonation is the area I have the most difficulty with. You can’t ignore it, because it is an important part of pronunciation, but it’s very hard to teach, learn, analyze and describe. I am not sure it should have as many chapters of the book as it does at the moment.I have spent most of my time worrying about.’

What is your favorite sound and why?

"I think I like the glottal stop best. It’s a mysterious creature, never allowed to be considered a phoneme but found very commonly in most accents of English, particularly among younger speakers. Very few teachers of pronunciation ever think of encouraging learners to use it, yet when I hear a learner who has picked up the appropriate patterns of usage for glottalization or glottal stop I find their accent sounds very much more natural and more youthfu!"

If you were to give one piece of advice for English learners working on improving their English pronunciation, what would that be?

"Make yourself break free of the self-consciousness that holds most learners back. Everyone is scared of sounding stupid when they try to speak with a new accent. Think of learning to swim, or to ride a bike – there has to be a moment when you take your foot off the ground and believe that you are not going to drown or fall off. Once you have got past this scary moment, it’s normal to make much quicker progress. So you need to throw off your inhibitions, speak out loudly and try to sound like an English stand-up comedian or rapper.’

SOURCES

1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Reading 2)https://www.uoanbar.edu.iq/HumanitarianEducationCollege/catalog/English%20Phonetics%20and%20Phonology_Peter%20Roach.pdf 3)https://www.cambridge.org/es/cambridgeenglish/authors/peter-roach 4) https://pronunciationstudio.com/peter-roach/

THANK you!