1989 IATEFL

The British version of TESOL has had a vigorous Pronunciation Special Interest Group (PronSIG) with an excellent newsletter since its founding 25 years ago.

1992 TESOL Vancouver

I showed copies of the PronSIG newsletter to a pronunciation-oriented audience and told them about the British group. The reaction was immediate: “Why don’t WE have such a group in TESOL?” So a group of us started collecting names on petitions at every convention we each attended. We collected a LOT of names in the next 3 years. But we were also running into resistance. We heard repeated use of the explanation: “We don’t feel it’s a good idea to encourage proliferation of Interest Sections.” This struck us as peculiar, since we were only asking for a little corner of our own, one out of 18.

1995 TESOL Long Beach

A PronSIG representative and our little group cooperated to put on a well-attended preconvention institute at TESOL in Long Beach. This was encouraging. But several of us attended the Interest Section Council meeting and realized that there was going to a problem. The rules required that the then existing 17 Interest Sections were going to have to vote in favor of our request at their annual business meetings, which were all held at the same time. So we had to get organized to send volunteer representatives (aka lobbyists) to each meeting. The core of the problem was that those Interest Sections were going to have to share convention slots and budgets with us. Also, it became sadly apparent that a lot of teachers really just don’t like pronunciation. This is weird but true.

1996 A Year for Getting Ready

As TESOL ’97 approached, we had an ongoing e-mail discussion of potential arguments, and many of us wrote letters to the leadership of the 17 existing Interest Sections. This letter-writing campaign even included some PronSIG people explaining how helpful they found having a forum concerned with their professional subject.

1997 Orlando

On the evening of the business meetings we established a central “Command Center” in the coffee shop, to gather the responses from each rep to the business meetings. The reps reported back: 17 yes votes and 1 no (elementary school level—people who didn’t realize that pronunciation is related to learning to read). The next day at the crucial Interest Section Council meeting, David Mendelsohn gave the 3-minute pitch we were allowed. The Council chair commented that there had been an “unprecedented” outpouring of letters in favor. Despite some lingering objections to “proliferation,” the motion was passed. We still had to wait for approval from the TESOL Board.

1998 Seattle

We were official. We now have our own meetings, our own newsletter, and a real place on the program. That’s how we came to be.

Judy B. Gilbert has an M.A. in linguistics from the University of California at Davis, with special study in acoustic phonetics at U.C. Berkeley She is the author of Clear Speech from the Start, (2nd edition) and Clear Speech, (4th edition) both from Cambridge University