Statement of Purpose: The Speech, Pronunciation, and Listening Interest Section (SPLIS) focuses on all aspects of oral/aural skills in English language teaching. We work to increase educators’ awareness of the importance of oral/aural skills for English learners of all ages, from early childhood through adult. We help educators recognize the role of spoken English in second language development, social well-being, and academic success. We support educators in all settings to help learners improve their pronunciation and listening skills. We encourage research and scholarship, disseminate information, develop teaching materials, and advance teaching tools and methods.

Leadership Team

Meet the Members:

Catherine Showalter

Catherine E. Showalter holds a PhD in Linguistics with a specialization in second language phonology from the University of Utah. She is currently the Associate Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research at North Carolina State University, as well as one of the book review editors for TESL-EJ. For the past few years, she was an Assistant Teaching Professor in the ESL program at Northeastern University and oversaw the undergraduate listening and speaking course. Her interests primarily include second language phono-lexical acquisition, the orthographic-phonological interface, and bridging gaps between experimental research and classroom practices as related to phonology and pronunciation. Her work has been published in Applied Psycholinguistics, Second Language Research, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition, among others.

Joshua Gordon

Joshua Gordon is Assistant Professor of TESOL and Applied Linguistics at the University of Northern Iowa. He received his Ph.D. in Second Language Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington. He has taught ESL, EFL, and Spanish as a foreign language. He has trained pre-service and in-service teachers in the United States and in Costa Rica. His research interests include second-language pronunciation teaching and learning, second-language teacher cognition, and nonnative-speaking teachers of English. His research has appeared in the Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, TESL Canada Journal, RELC Journal, Language Teaching Research, and edited volumes and conference proceedings.

Sinem Sonsaat-Hegelheimer

Sinem Sonsaat-Hegelheimer received her PhD in Applied Linguistics and Technology, Iowa State University in 2017. She is the editorial assistant of the Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, the co-developer of pronunciationforteachers.com, and the chair of the Speech Pronunciation and Listening Interest Section of TESOL International Association. Her research interests include pronunciation teaching, materials evaluation and development, and computer-assisted language learning. She has published her work in TESOL Quarterly, CATESOL Journal, and The Routledge Handbook of English Pronunciation.

Mara Haslam

Mara Haslam works as a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Language Education at Stockholm University, Sweden. Mara received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Utah in 2011. Her research interests include second language phonology, including using laboratory methods to identify priorities for pronunciation teaching.

Brandon Cooper

Brandon Cooper is a Senior Instructional Consultant in the Center for Teaching Excellence at Texas A&M University. He earned his PhD in Linguistics from the University of South Carolina in 2020. His research interests include communication for learning, perceptual factors in spoken language comprehension, and critical language pedagogy. His most recent work appears in Proceedings of the 11th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching conference.

Pelin Irgin

Pelin Irginis an assistant professor of English Language Education at TED University in Turkey. She received her PhD in English Language Teaching at Hacettepe University, Turkey, and completed her doctorate thesis research at University of Reading, UK. Her research interests are language learning and cognition, EFL listening comprehension and Language learner strategies, listening strategies intervention to young learners, and awareness-raising activity design for listening strategies in EFL context. She teaches undergraduate courses in linguistics, language acquisition in L1/L2, listening and reading skills. She has published in various refereed journals and presented papers at conferences. She is currently serving on the editorial boards of international publications. She is also the community manager of the SPLIS Steering Committee of 2020-2021.

Sezgi Acar

Sezgi Acar is a graduate student in applied linguistics at the University of Alabama and a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of English where she currently teaches first-year composition. She has taught English as a second and foreign language for over 8 years in Turkey and in the U.S. She also taught Turkish as a foreign language as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Richmond. She holds an MA in TESOL from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Nancy Elliott

Nancy Elliott has a PhD in linguistics from Indiana University, specializing in phonology and sociolinguistics. Her research areas are in L2 comprehensibility and intelligibility; English dialectology; and sociophonetics. She has 37 years of experience teaching university-level ESL at the University of Kansas, Universität Heidelberg, Indiana University, ELS Berlitz at Southern Oregon University, and the University of Oregon. For the past ten years she has been teaching primarily listening, speaking, and pronunciation courses in the American English Institute at the University of Oregon. Here, she developed the pronunciation teaching tool known as the Vowel Elevator.