English Pronunciation in a Global World: A MOOC course for pronunciation teaching

he paper presents the Massive Open and Online Course (MOOC) English Pronunciation in a Global World (Rupp, 2019). We outline the context in which the MOOC was created, one in which English is a global language yet the majority of the world's population do not speak English (Crystal, 2017), and one in which linguistic misunderstandings occur and accent discrimination persists (Lev-Ari, 2021). We outline the aims of the MOOC and describe how we sought to achieve these aims using linguistic and psychological theories (Derwing & Munro, 2015; Ryan & Deci, 2000), as well as methods from the Mixed Classroom Model in Practice (Ramdas et al., 2019). We report on the findings from running the MOOC thus far, some of which we anticipated (e.g., the new type of pronunciation data it generates) and some of which were not immediately foreseen (e.g., participants spontaneously mentoring other participants). In the discussion we reflect on the advantages and challenges associated with using a MOOC for pronunciation teaching, and address the opportunities that it provides.