Prof. Marklen Konurbayev

Plenary Address

Prof. Marklen Konurbayev

Philology Department, MSU

Title: "Like Father, Like Son: Individual Touch in Teaching English Pronunciation and Rhetoric"

Phonetic skills can hardly be taught purely technically through teacher's explanation of articulatory peculiarities of sounds and general drill. Even if the students manage to cope with the theoretical side of pronunciation learning - this will not move them any closer to the practical acquisition of standard English sounds.
In order to make this activity really functional a teacher of phonetics should learn to speak the same language with his or her students and have at his/her disposal a complex of instruments that includes a profound knowledge of physiology of speech, human psychology and the ability to inspire student to imitation along the lines set by a professional phonetician. Marklen Konurbayev presents this approach in action.

Bio

With over 17 years in Moscow State University, Marklen combines teaching, research, translation practices and business in a vibrant Russian environment. Responding to multiple requests from colleagues and businesses he succeeded in working out new techniques and approaches to improving international business communication in multiple areas ranging from oral presentation in public to writing effective documents targeting wide international audiences. His most recent reports and publications on the new multi-dimensional text formats highlight some of the excellent examples of how they could be most profitably used in a highly diversified international business community.
Marklen Konurbaev has a Ph.D. in Phonostylistics from the Moscow State University. He was a founder and an editor of Folia Anglistica, a publication on new developments in modern anglistics that had among its authors Professors David Crystal, Thomas Sebeok, David Lodge, Margaret Drabble and many other outstanding linguists, writers and philologists.
In Moscow University Marklen is involved in teaching phonetics, stylistics, theory and practice of translation. Some of the translations of fiction prepared by his students have been published and won awards of All-Russia Book Exhibition. Marklen is the author of an intuitive psychological technique in teaching standard British pronunciation and is actively working on developing a new standard of pronunciation teaching in the modern cross-cultural environment.