John C. Wells - Career

Career

Wells earned his BA at Cambridge, and his MA and Ph.D. at London.

He is well known for his book and cassette Accents of English, the book and CD The Sounds of the IPA, Lingvistikaj Aspektoj de Esperanto, and the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. He is the author of the most widely used English-Esperanto dictionary.

Until his retirement, Wells directed UCL's two-week phonetics summer course, focusing on practical and theoretical phonetics as well as aspects of teaching phonetics. The course ends with written and oral examinations, for which the IPA Certificate of Proficiency in the Phonetics of English is awarded.

A considerable part of Wells's research focuses on the phonetic description of varieties of English. From 2003 to 2007 he was president of the International Phonetic Association. He is also a member of the six-person Academic Advisory Committee at Linguaphone.

Wells has long been a pioneer of new technology. He is the inventor of the X-SAMPA ASCII phonetic alphabet for use in computers that could not handle IPA symbols. He learnt HTML in the mid-1990s and created a webpage that compiled media references to Estuary English, a concept that he has always been sceptical of. Although now retired, Wells still runs a phonetic blog that attracts comments from regular readers.

Read more about this topic:  John C. Wells

Famous quotes containing the word career:

    Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.
    Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)

    Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.
    Ann Oakley (b. 1944)

    What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.
    Arlie Hochschild (20th century)