The abrupt emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020 forced tertiary professors to urgently adapt the face-to-face courses they were lecturing to emergency remote teaching. Researchers of different fields have started to investigate and share their thoughts on which are the best methodologies to guarantee a high-quality learning experience while coping with students’ anxiety and teachers’ lack of technical background. The present study examines the adaptation of an English pronunciation course at Rovira i Virgili university to the online setting imposed by the outbreak of the pandemic. The students who took the course were asked to fill in a satisfaction survey containing multiple choice, Likert scale and open questions on the different measures taken and the general progress of the course. Results show that students were higly satisfied with the adaptation of the course to the online context, and that the methods adopted and tools provided were useful and sufficient to continue with the adequate functioning of the course. Hence, this study is a sample of how to teach pronunciation remotely in particular, and how to successfully adapt a face-to-face university course to emergency remote teaching in general, guaranteeing students’ learning and engagement.

This paper focuses on the design and implementation of a ten-week pronunciation module within a university technical English course as part of a broader study that investigates the efficacy of explicit rhythm instruction to improve engineering students' prosody in English. Sessions were adapted to the course contents and followed Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin's (1996) steps to teach communicatively. The participants were 298 Spanish/Catalan-speaking first-year undergraduate engineering students divided into three experimental groups and three control groups. The experimental groups received explicit rhythm instruction while the control groups did not. They all were recorded before and after the training. Ten sentences were analyzed acoustically and measures of rhythm (VarcoV) were obtained. Preliminary results revealed that students who took rhythm instruction tended to increase their VarcoV values, approaching English rhythm, while the control group showed a volatile behavior. The comparison of the effect sizes of each group's differences in performance before and after instruction was statistically significant. Findings suggest that rhythm instruction can be beneficial to enhance EFL students' prosody and that pronunciation can be effectively introduced within an ESP course. 1 ESP stands for English for specific purposes.

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This review critiques Červinková Poesová and Klára Uličná’s e-book Becoming a Pronunciation teacher. It offers an overview and critical interpretation of the content, together with a display of its convenience as a practical handbook for EFL/ESL teachers and researchers of second language pronunciation instruction. The review will evaluate the authors’ approach as well as its effectiveness as a useful tool to enhance pronunciation teaching in EFL/ESL classrooms.

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