Teaching English Pronunciation

In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Dr Hanna Torsh talks to Lindsay McMahon, founder of the All Ears English Podcast, about pronunciation teaching for global English. 

What does it mean to speak well? And what does it mean to teach others to speak English well? What does good English sound like for you?  

These are questions which teachers of English, as a first, second or foreign language and everything in-between, need to grapple with.

In the interview, I talk to Lindsay about her approach to English language teaching, connection not perfection, and how this translates to a focus on pronunciation which is suited for the needs of her students. This means using authentic interactions as much as possible, and working to change minds about the value of ‘native’ accents if most of your interactions are actually using English in global contexts with other multilingual speakers rather than in inner-circle countries with first language speakers. Finally, we touch briefly on what the surge in speech technologies means for teaching and learning pronunciation.  

If you liked this episode, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends. 

Suggestions for further reading 

Burns, A., & Seidlhofer, B. (2020). Speaking and pronunciation. In M. P. H. Rodgers & N. Schmitt (Eds.), An Introduction to Applied Linguistics (3rd ed., pp. 240–258). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429424465-14
Canagarajah, A. S. (2012). Teacher Development in a Global Profession: An Autoethnography. TESOL Quarterly, 46(2), 258–279. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.18
Jenkins, J. (2000). The Phonology of English as an International Language. Oxford University Press.
Jenkins, J. (2002). A Sociolinguistically Based, Empirically Researched Pronunciation Syllabus for English as an International Language. Applied Linguistics, 23(1), 83-103.
Jenkins, J. (2004). Research in teaching pronunciation and intonation. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 24, 109-125.
Jenkins, J. (2015). World Englishes : a resource book for students (3rd ed.). Routledge.
Low, E.-L. (2015). Current issues in EIL pronunciation teaching. In Pronunciation for English As an International Language (1st ed., pp. 128–149). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315814131-10
Marlina, R. (2025). Evaluating the International and Intercultural Orientation of an ELT Textbook in Cambodia through the Lens of Global Englishes Language Teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 59(1), 344–358. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3330
Rose, H., & Galloway, N. (2019). Global Englishes for language teaching. Cambridge University Press.
Yates, L., & Zielinski, B. (2009). Give it a go: Teaching pronunciation to adults. Adult Migrant English Program AMEP Research Centre, Macquarie University.  

Transcript (added April 14, 2026)

Hanna:

Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Hannah Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in Applied and Sociolinguistics at Macquarie University. My guest today is Lindsay McMahon. Lindsay is the founder of the All Ears English podcast and app, and we’re going to talk about teaching pronunciation.

Lindsay, according to her fantastic website, has been an English instructor for over 15 years, and her podcast is in the top 20 ranked podcasts in Korea, Japan, Brazil, and China. Welcome to the show, Lindsay!

Lindsay: Thank you, Hanna. I’m really glad to be here.

Hanna: Oh, we’re thrilled to have you. So, can you start off by telling us a bit about yourself and how you started this, highly successful English language learning podcast, All Ears English?

Lindsay: Yes, I’d be happy to. So I started my career after college, traveling the world and teaching English to adults as a second language. So I lived in Japan, taught there, saw that angle of teaching, lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, taught there, as well as Guatemala, and then New York City, where I was able to teach students from all over the world.

And I saw some of the gaps out there in the language training world, especially for adult learners, but I knew that I loved interacting with my students, learning from them about the world. I could always learn more from them than they could for me, I think, from my perspective. And at the same time, so this is about 2012, 2010 to 2012, podcasting was just coming up, it was just becoming popular. There were a few shows out there, but not too, too many, and I thought, oh my gosh, what if we could teach English through a podcast? It sounds like a very simple concept now, but at the time, it was somewhat new. And so I knew another teacher who was also living in Boston at the time. I called her, and I said, hey, do you want to start a show together? She said, yeah, let’s do it. It was as simple as plugging in the mic, Hannah. I mean, that’s what I love about podcasting, it is very approachable for any teacher, any educator, they can literally plug in the microphone and go for it.

Hanna: Yeah, absolutely. That’s lovely. It’s a lovely origin story. And, and obviously it worked, because you’re still going. It’s been 12 years now, so, that’s fantastic. Well, look, we could talk for a whole episode about the process of putting that together, but today I really would like to focus in on pronunciation teaching. Now, I don’t know if  this, but I teach a unit at Macquarie University on pronunciation teaching, and it’s one of the areas of language teaching that has been kind of, kind of been tricky. So, it’s called sometimes the Cinderella of language teaching. Yeah. So I’m really keen to know, how, with your approach to language teaching, how do you approach this aspect of language, pronunciation?

Lindsay: Yeah, this is a really important thing to talk about, because it is one of the things that really plagues our students, our listeners the most, but it’s one of the things that is not taught as much in traditional TESOL programs. When I got started in ESL, I took a 30-day program at the School for International Training, which is fantastic, by the way, in Brattleboro, Vermont, and there wasn’t a ton of pronunciation taught, or how to teach pronunciation wasn’t taught to us as much. However, so our main philosophy, broadly speaking, around teaching pronunciation comes back to our overall philosophy of our podcast and our company, which is connection, not perfection.

It’s not just a trademark for us, it’s really a it’s a vision, it’s it touches our hearts. This is comes back to my origin story as a language learner, having traveled the world and learned Spanish one moment on a beach in South America, sitting there feeling quite isolated, frankly, feeling like I had some of the language, but I was too self-conscious to really connect. And that’s where, as we got through episode 50 of the show, we thought, okay, let’s use a different approach here. Well, the reason we’re learning languages is not to learn a language. It’s actually for human connection. And we know that, yes, it’s true, but if we can remember that, if our students can remember that on a day-to-day basis, it will be transformational.

So, our goal is to actually take human connection as the ultimate goal into pronunciation. And so we can talk a little bit today about how we do that, and we’ve just launched a new pronunciation course, so we’ve had a chance to figure that out a little bit in the last few months. Yeah.

Hanna: Oh, great, yeah. Oh, I love that, yeah, I mean, I there’s so many important ideas wrapped up in that idea of connection, not perfection, and this is where, as an applied linguist, I always think, something one of my professors said to me in my training it’s never about language. It’s always about people. That’s you can’t separate them. And so, yeah, I really love that slogan.

Lindsay: It’s so true, and especially, Hanna, with adult learners, because I think what I’ve found, at least for excuse me, millennials, Gen Xers, they’ve gone through a life of kind of trauma in the classroom, in a sense, of the methods that have been used, and it’s been ingrained in them. They have a narrative about how they are as an English speaker, and frankly, it’s usually not a very positive one. And so that kind of breaks my heart, and so our goal is to change that narrative and put something truly more important. I mean, I don’t think that you can be self-conscious and be seeking connection at the same time. The human brain can’t do it. And so that’s the idea.

Hanna: Oh, that’s wonderful, yeah. Yeah, I talk about this in my own

book, actually, that my PhD research is based on about, language learning in Australian language classrooms. So, I don’t know if you’re interested, but just a little side note. So, in Australia, we haven’t had a great history of foreign language learning, and part of it has been teaching learners to kind of feel like they’re bad language learners. And, I mean, you could apply that globally to other methods of teaching English as well. That’s right. So, you kind of have this learner, who has all of this sense of negativity around their own abilities, yeah, yeah, perfect. And it’s so linked to pronunciation, isn’t it? Because pronunciation is one of those, sort of, aspects of language performance that is very much connected to our, sort of, social being. It’s not something you can do independently, on your own, in front of a book. , it has to come in that moment. So maybe, let’s talk a bit about your pronunciation course and your approach to teaching pronunciation.

Lindsay: Yeah, exactly. I’d love to. So, when we started to design this course back in September, I worked with a curriculum developer who was fantastic, and we sat down and we thought, what will be the angle that will make sense with the connection mentality? We kind of had two choices, and I see pronunciation courses going in one of two ways. Some focus on specific accents. Teaching the American accent, teaching the British accent, teaching the regional accent, speak like an American, quote-unquote. It’s out there, we realized that was an option for us, but then we thought there would be a better way to do that, and the goal of this course and our overall philosophy on pronunciation is clear speech.

It’s very simple. It’s clear speech for global English, because I’m not sure that the American accent or the British accent is the future of global business. Many of our listeners are, in fact, learning for their career. Or they’re kind of straddling between learning for, like, life fulfillment, in a sense, travel, feeling good about achieving their goals, and future career opportunities. And so we decided to focus on not showing you how to speak like an American, or speak with an American accent, how to speak clearly, and how to reduce your effort in speaking. When we know how to speak clearly, we reduce our effort. So what that comes down to, on a principle level is understanding that English is a stress-timed language. First of all, not a syllable-time language, like so many other languages. And this is where we get into the weeds. I’m not an expert in pronunciation myself, it’s why the team developed the course, but it really is about studying the heartbeat of English, right, broadly speaking and understanding that first, and before we start to kind of mimic and start to sound American. I don’t I don’t love the connotation of that.

Hanna: That is super interesting, and as you say, that’s certainly out there in the in the in the language teaching landscape, the idea of, like, learning a particular accent. And so you decided instead to focus on this idea of clear speech, and when you talk about clear speech, so you were interested in, like, the you’re interested in the rhythm of English, that it’s stress-timed.

And so how does your, how does that fit in with the idea of, connection, I guess? So how do those because one of the things, I think, that is very common, or is a bit of a theme in the pronunciation literature, is the idea of intelligibility rather than native accents. So maybe you could tell me a little bit more about that.

Lindsay: Yeah, that’s very similar. So I see intelligibility as a very similar thing to clear speech, right? Can you be understood? Can you reduce the effort with which others have to put in to understand you, and vice versa, the amount of effort you are spending, on trying to pronounce correctly? Therefore, you’re connecting, right, so in those moments, we still believe you can make pronunciation quote-unquote mistakes and still find connection.

So the way that kind of breaks down in our course, all of the courses and all the material that we have are pretty natural, so we always bring in interviews with native speakers into the course, and they’re natural. They’re not rehearsed, they’re not prepared, they’re not scripted in any way. This is for all of our courses. We tend to target the B2C1 level in our courses, so they, our students are ready for that. So it’s a lot of shadowing with these very real, natural conversations. So it’s taking the raw English and looking at how does it actually look, but stepping back without this pressure to repeat and sound like this accent. Instead, starting by observing how this accent might be different, how this rhythm might be different from the way maybe we speak in our native languages. To compare that, first of all. Yeah.

Hanna: If that’s the if the aim is then to think about rhythm, and this is certainly something that’s come up a lot in the in the literature about, different targets, so rather than looking at native accents as targets, looking at things like, international English, or global English, or even English as a lingua franca the work of Jennifer Jenkins. All of those models often talk about rhythm as sort of more important than, say, and this is something I talk about with my students a lot, and there are different ideas about it, but more important than, say, getting the TH sound right. Actually, the rhythm of speech, gives listeners a lot more clues as to meaning than just getting those individual segments right.

Lindsay: 100%. And I think listening is really tied in with pronunciation, right? We can’t really extract them from each other. So essentially, I was just talking to one of our students last week, and he works for a consulting company in the Middle East, and he’s still kind of in the mentality of, I want to practice with a native speaker, and I was trying to understand I know that I understand that mentality, I know it’s been around for a long time, but I was challenging him a little bit. And I was asking him, who do you actually work with on a daily basis? Who are these people that you’re having to present to where the stakes are really high for you? And I understand the stakes are high, right? And he said it’s 99% people from the Middle East speaking in English. And I said, oh, okay then, so this makes sense that we might want to expand our idea of who we want to be practicing with, and practicing for, and what our goal is, and that’s where the connection piece comes in. Ultimately, you’re going for the connection.

Hanna: So, in that sense, one of the things that for example, English teachers, or student English teachers, or those who want to improve their professional skills in English language teaching, can think about then is who are their students actually talking to? We know this as well from the literature, that in terms of language users, English has many, many more people using it as a second language. So you and I are kind of unrepresentative here, Lindsay because we are speaking our first language together, but actually, most interactions happen between speakers of second languages, and so they are, in fact, the target audience, if you like, the target listeners.

Lindsay: Exactly, so that really changes everything in the approach, and what now becomes more important, especially with the, I guess, post-COVID world, the Zoom world. Many of our students are just on Zoom conference calls all day with someone from Australia, someone from the UK, someone from Japan, someone from Brazil, right? And so we’re having all these different accents, and again, and that’s where the goal becomes clear speech. So, I think this approach is really set up for the future, a little bit more so than the old what I would call the old model, in my opinion.

Hanna: And I mean, that’s something I think that, really links in with this sort of digital shift in language teaching too, right? That actually, if our communication is, like we’re doing right now, is over a screen, we do have to be clearer, because we’re not in person, we can’t use all of those – it’s embodied, because we can see each other, but it’s very different to being in person. And that just means we have to be a little bit more tolerant of, maybe, disfluencies, a little bit more, accommodating in terms of our listener, and accommodating their needs. So, yeah. I mean, that’s something Jennifer Jenkins talks about a lot, too, in the lingua franca model, is accommodation. So it’s not just the speaker and their pronunciation, but of course also how much they’re willing to accommodate the other person’s language and differences from what they might expect.

Lindsay: Yeah, absolutely, 100%. There’s a lot to think about here. And as we’re building courses with the listening piece, one student told me last week that she struggles a lot when she’s on Zoom calls, and the person turns off their camera, just as you’re describing, and that becomes 10 times harder from a listening perspective. So as we build our courses, as we build our curriculum, really thinking about how can we create specific scenarios for students so we can get deliberate practice in those exact scenarios. That’s what we’ll be looking at for next year.

Hanna: This is also something, I don’t know how you whether you do this sort of purposefully in your course, but something I’m trying to do in my unit, and is certainly being advocated by other researchers in this space developing curricula for global English, is introducing just a diversity of speakers into your curriculum, so that instead of just hearing these, kind of, often highly scripted, I mean, I think that’s part of it too, the scripting, but highly scripted first language speakers, interacting with no problems as though speaking and listening are completely problem-free activities. You actually have a diversity of accents and a kind of diversity of situations, some of which, as you say, are not scripted.

Lindsay: Absolutely, and background noise, actually creating that authentic environment, or not creating it, filming in it, right? Going out there and finding people to interview and collaborate with in those natural environments. We built a course back in 2016, which is becoming a little dated at this point, but we enjoyed building it, drove around the U.S. and interviewed all different people with all different American accents, but also international accents at festivals, fairs, restaurants, really just out in the world. And a lot of students, when they get in the course, they get a little intimidated because it’s a really challenging course, but if you stick with it, that brings up the question of how do we teach that durability of commitment, right? How do we make sure we keep coming back to something that feels hard the first time, but if we stick with it. Within 6 months or a year, we can get there.

Hanna: Oh, that’s wonderful! I will have to check that out, because I have to say, I am fairly unfamiliar with the range of accents in the US, and there is a huge range, and it’s 400 years, plus, of course, the First Peoples of occupation, so a long time to develop language change. Yeah, I would love to do that. Yeah, I mean, that’s certainly something we hear from our students here, too, because the Australian accent is not widely represented, so a lot of migrants to Australia get a real shock when they come, and they’ve been studying English for a long time. And again it comes back to that sense of, actually, we need to prepare learners for a diversity of accents so that they don’t have that real negative response straight away to something that sounds I’ve had some fantastic comments over the years that sounds outlandish. That was my favorite one.

Lindsay: That’s really nice.

Hanna: Australian accent, yes, yes, just, I mean, if you’re only used to hearing, let’s say, a standard British, English, Australian on the street, sounds very different to that, and as you say, it can be quite difficult and traumatising. We talked a little bit before about the challenge of learning English, in a kind of negative way, and the trauma of that. And how do you how do you support learners to get through that?

Lindsay: And it’s an important point that you brought up, Hanna, this idea of the wall goes up. I’m sure a lot of research has been done on this, the first listening shock concept, right? When we hear that line that we feel like we can’t understand, then all of a sudden, that wall goes up in our head, and we think we can’t understand anything moving forward. And how do we teach our students to bring that down? I mean, again, like I said, for us, it comes back to what are we focusing on? It’s the eye contact, it’s the, can I get a laugh out of this person? Can I share a joke? Can I share a story? Share a human moment? But how can we further bring that wall down so that doesn’t happen as quickly or as easily?

Hanna: I think that’s so, it’s kind of connected to that idea in language teaching of the effective filter that emotionally, you feel very yeah, absolutely, and, so my second language is German, and I find, I learn standard German, as we do, and I find I, struggle so much with so-called dialect, and I have to really notice my own discomfort with it, and kind of sit with it a bit, and, and persevere. Yeah, so, and that kind of leads me, I guess, back to the idea that with pronunciation, I think we also need to remember it’s not just about the speaker. So sometimes, no matter how clearly you speak, or how much you’re trying, the context is such that you’re not going to be invited in, or someone’s not going to accommodate you, and that is that is that is on them, not on you. So, how do you deal with that issue with your learners? That’s certainly something that comes up with my teaching.

Lindsay: Yeah, I think it’s teaching vocabulary skills or communication skills to ask good questions, making sure that we understand the context we’re in, how we can add value in any given situation, asking the right questions of how to get yourself back into that conversation. 100% it’s a normal, natural thing, where it’s not always possible to plug in in every situation, and also just the fact of knowing that that’s going to happen, right? We could have great, clear speech, ready for the global business world, but there could be a day where it doesn’t work out, and we have to be okay with that.

Hanna: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think, potentially also in professional situations, there is much more awareness, as we talked about before, that there’s so many second language speakers in that space. What we find in the migration space is it’s often kind of interpersonal situations where for whatever reason, people are not very tolerant, or they’re not really willing to accommodate. And no matter how much people try, in fact it’s a two-way street, and so sometimes you have to acknowledge it’s not anything to do with your own pronunciation as a second language user, it’s actually someone else’s unwillingness to understand, because their walls are up for whatever reason, yeah.

Lindsay: Sure. Yeah, and so it’s an I mean, I think any challenge in life, especially interpersonal challenges, are a chance to build confidence, and go inward a bit, and kind of work on our own, I guess, mindfulness, in a sense, or just approach to conflict. And so it’s an invitation, I think going through life without learning a second language is would be sad. I mean it just opens you up to another world, so obviously there are gonna be challenges, and that’s on some level, that’s a gift, right?

Hanna: Yeah, and one of the things that we try and do, with our, with our students and also with our sort of research team is to sort of build that solidarity around this is something that happens to all of us as second language users. This is kind of part of the experience, and we all see it, and we all recognize it, and sometimes, no matter how fantastic you are as a communicator if it doesn’t work, it’s it’s actually nothing to do with you. So it’s always a two-way street, speaking, I always say, . It’s not all your responsibility to make yourself understood, it’s also the other person you’re talking to.

Lindsay: 100%, and also for your teachers, for your listeners, I mean, I think that’s where our fuel as teachers comes from, right? So, like I said, my origin story came from trying to learn Spanish, feeling super disconnected and lonely on a beach in Colombia, and then my kind of pain from that moment still, like, extends out now, came into our philosophy, our vision, and it fires up my teaching even 15 years later, right? So, like, maybe that’s something teachers need to go through to have had some kind of experience like that to bring that into their teaching.

Hanna: It’s a kind of metamorphosis that I think we all go through. Yeah, wonderful. Oh, look, it’s been such a pleasure to talk to you about this topic, and it just sounds like a fantastic course, and I really love the sound of that other episode with all the different accents. I’m definitely going to check that out. But before we, wrap up, I would like you to tell me a little bit about what you think, two things. One is, like, you talked a little bit about what you think will happen with pronunciation in the future. Also, what’s kind of next for you with the app? What’s on the horizon, for all English and for you, personally?

Lindsay: Yeah. Well, one thing I’d love to get back to is live events. We’ve done live events over the years, we haven’t done them in a while, but inviting students to come and join us in a city and do an urban immersion adventure, where we pair them, we ask them to go out and do scavenger hunts around the city. It’s just, they’ve been the coolest events and the most transformative, where we’ve been able to see the most growth from our students. Those are hard to organize in a lot of work, but we have loved them, so I’d love Lindsay: like to bring that back, but on the more scalable level, I think AI is coming for us, for sure, but not in a negative way. We’re planning on figuring out a way to leverage it. We’ve been experimenting with how we can use it in pronunciation corrections, but also just together, with the teacher alongside the AI, not necessarily replacing the AI. So we just need to figure out a way to do that remotely, because most of our students are coming from other countries and studying remotely with us. So AI will definitely be a big part of it, and we’ll be continuing with our podcast. That is our biggest megaphone, that is how we get our philosophy out there, and how we can see the improvement from the very beginning from our listeners, from our students, and we love hearing from them, and seeing that it’s working and that it’s helping them. So, the show will go on.

Hanna: Wonderful. Oh, I have to just ask about the AI thing. So that’s, that’s really interesting. One of the things that’s coming up a lot on my radar is the use of the automated tech, the automated speech recognition for pronunciation teaching. And there, I have to say, as an Australian English speaker, that the standard, speech recognition on Microsoft Office is completely humiliating, because as an Australian English speaker, everything that I say is, is it’s understood through a filter of American standard American, and so, I when I when it writes it out, I sound like I have, like, a really strong Australian accent, and all of my vowels are really strong which is not great as an educator and a teacher, you don’t want to hear you’ve got a really strong, difficult to understand accent. So, yeah, so but certainly it’s something that I think is a really great possibility, because practicing pronunciation is really on your own is almost impossible without a listener to tell you, is that comprehensible? So it’s there’s a possibility there.

Lindsay: Yes, students want immediate feedback, and I understand why they do, of course they do, more so than any other area of English, vocabulary idioms. I was working with a curriculum developer this year, building a course, and he was from Scotland, and he was saying the same thing. The Scottish accent does not work as well with AI, but I think that’s just a matter of time. I think, I mean, it’s just how fast things are moving. I think in 6 months to a year, that won’t be an issue anymore, I hope, genuinely. And so what we do, we’re actually working with a company called Sensei AI. They’re based, I think, in they’re based in the US, but they have a large market in Asia, so working with Asian schools in Asia, with kids, actually. And they have a nice tool. We’re looking at some other options, too, so it’s just as simple speaking into the recorder, and then getting an analysis of each word, of the rhythm, of that kind of thing. So, we’ll just we’ll keep digging into it, I think. It’s impossible to ignore. I know our students are out there using AI on their own, so we’d like to guide that a bit more with a clear curriculum. , we want to help you get somewhere, not just chat, because we know when we just kind of chat, we end up at that intermediate plateau, right? That B2 level where we’re not able to move into C1, C2. So, that’s kind of our vision, but it is at the same time a little intimidating, I’m not gonna lie, right? I mean, it’ll change the industry significantly.

Hanna: Yeah, absolutely, but that’s it’s good to know you’ve got a Scotsman working on it, because yeah, he would have exactly the same issue, so but yeah, I think that a tool where you have input from language experts is really valuable, and yeah, I’ll definitely be looking out for that, and yeah, really interesting, the idea of it looking at rhythm, because I think that’s something that I don’t have a problem with when I do speech recognition. Like, it gets all my vowels wrong and some of my words, but the general sentences, it can pick that up fine. And that is something that we know, we know, gets in the way of intelligibility when speech is different. So there’s some work in Australia by Professor Linda Yates, who’s worked on this for many years, about exactly this, and in the migrant learning space, about the importance of speech rhythm. So we’ll keep an eye out on that, and the tool is there. I would love to check it out. Lindsay, it’s been so lovely talking to you about this. Thank you so much.

Lindsay: Thank you! Thank you so much for having me on.

Hanna: That was lovely, and thanks all to our audience for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and don’t forget to recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time.