John Levis

Associate Professor of English as a Second Language/Applied Linguistics
Program Chair, Interdiscipinary Program in Linguistics
Director of Graduate Education
Organizer, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference
TESL/Applied Linguistics, Department of English, Iowa State University
Campus Box 1201, Ames, IA 50011-1201
Office: Ross Hall, Room 337
Phone: 515-294-7524 * Fax: 515-294-6814

CURRICULUM VITAE

Who I am

I have been teaching ESL for 25 years, mostly at the university level. For 20 years I have worked with teachers, teaching them, supervising them and presenting workshops on how to teach. My specialty is English pronunciation. This specialty has led me to explore a wide variety of topics, including teaching pronunciation, teaching other teachers about teaching pronunciation, the roles of dialects in teaching pronunciation, and examining what makes speech intelligible. I have presented papers and taught in Taiwan, Ukraine, Canada, Scotland and the US. I have written articles about pronunciation teaching in a variety of journals, from the more theoretical (such as Applied Linguistics) to those that mix theory and practice (such as TESOL Quarterly) to those that are quite practically minded (TESOL Journal, ELT Journal). I am also the creator and organizer of the Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching conference, now going into its fifth year. The conference attracts scholars and teachers interested in pronunciation from around the world and provides a freely available reviewed electronic proceedings (see links below for three years of proceedings). Finally, I am the co-author (with Greta Muller Levis) of a new ESL pronunciation textbook, Pronunciation for a Purpose.

Courses Currently Taught

ENGL 630 (Technology and the teaching of pronunciation and oral skills), M, 6-9 Ross 312

Office Hours - Fall 2013

M 2-4 and by appointment

My research interests

I am the co-editor for two books now in the process: The Handbook of English Pronunciation (Wiley Blackwell) and Social Factors in L2 Pronunciation (De Gruyter Mouton). I am also working on a book on the role of pronunciation in a communicative approach to language teaching. In addition, I am in the midst of several research studies related to judgments of speech intelligibility and word frequency. I am the organizer of the Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching conference at Iowa State. Online proceedings are linked below. Finally, I have co-edited (with Murray Munro of Simon Fraser University) the Phonetics and Phonology section of a new Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Our section includes 50 entries, each between 1500 and 4000 words.

Some publications

Written English into spoken: A functional discourse analysis of American, Indian and Chinese TA presentations (2012)

Learning to talk about language in an online linguistics course (2011)

Proceedings of the 3rd Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference (held Sept. 2011)

Proceedings of the 2nd Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference (held Sept. 2010)

Proceedings of the 1st Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference (held Sept. 2009)

Rebuilding a professional space for pronunciation. (2010)

Authentic speech and teaching sentence focus. (2010).

Minimal pairs in spoken corpora: Implications for pronunciation assessment and teaching (2008)

The following paper appeared in 2007 in Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, a journal published by Cambridge University Press

Computer technology in teaching and researching pronunciation

The following paper appeared November 2007 in Language Awareness, a journal published by Multilingual Matters

Phonological awareness and speech comprehensibility: An exploratory study

Courses Taught and Teaching Interests

We are developing many of our courses to be taught online. This past summer, I taught Introduction to Linguistic Analysis (ENGL 511) fully online for the second time (no, it was not easier), and this fall, we have TESL Methods and Materials (ENGL 518) available. Last spring, ENGL 525 (Methods of Teaching Listening, Speaking and Pronunciation)also went online.

ENGL 99S (Academic Speaking and Pronunciation)
ENGL 101D (Academic Writing II)
WLC/LING 119 (Introduction to World Languages)
ENGL/LING 219 (Introduction to Linguistics)
ENGL/LING 420 (History of the English Language)
ENGL 489 (Special Topics: American English Dialects)
ENGL 511 (Introduction to Linguistic Analysis)
ENGL 514 (Introduction to Sociolinguistics)
ENGL 518 (TESL Methods and Materials)
ENGL 525 (Methods for Teaching ESL Listening, Speaking and Pronunciation)
HON 322 (English Dialects of North America)
ENGL 630 (Technology and the teaching of pronunciation and oral skills)