1989

The England-based International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) had formed a Pronunciation Special Interest Group (PronSIG) which launched an excellent newsletter this year.  

1992, TESOL Vancouver

I showed recent copies of the PronSIG newsletter to a pronunciation-oriented audience and told them about IATEFL. 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 interest sections. 

1995, TESOL Long Beach

A PronSIG representative and a few of us cooperated to put on a well-attended Preconvention Institute at TESOL in Long Beach. This was encouraging. But several of us also attended the Interest Section Council meeting and realized that there was going to be 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 (a.k.a. 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.  We realized that it was going to take a  year to organize our effort.  

1996, A Year for Getting Ready

Throughout the year, a small group of pronunciation teachers, led by Joan Morley, Bill Acton, Rita Wong, Judy Gilbert, David Mendelsohn, and Linda Grant, along with others, had an ongoing email 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 several IATEFL 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. There was some anxiety but the reps reported back that we had gotten 16 Yes votes and only 1 No vote.  Then, 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 our favor. Despite some lingering objections to “proliferation of Interest Sections” the motion was passed. We still had to wait for approval from the TESOL Board. But this finally happened.  

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. Gilberthas an MA in linguistics from the University of California at Davis, with special study in acoustic phonetics at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Clear Speech from the Start (2nd edition) and Clear Speech (4th edition), both from Cambridge University Press, 2012.