Rafael Monroy Casas

RAFAEL MONROY CASAS, BIO-DATA

Born in Zamora (Spain), I graduated in Philosophy and Letters (English and French) at
Valencia University (1971). In 1972, I presented a graduate thesis on Arnold Wesker’s
theatre. In 1973, sponsored by a Unesco scholarship, I moved to the Department of
Linguistics at Reading University (U.K.), where I spent three years, during which time I
completed an M.A. in Linguistics and carried out research under the supervision of David
Crystal, Ron Brasington and Peter Roach. I also met A. C. Gimson and O’Connor at University
College, London, who were most helpful during a short stay of two months. A few years later,
I had the privilege to be appointed Visiting Professor at UCL for a six-month period, where
John Wells held the Chair of Phonetics at the time. In 1976, I received my PhD from Murcia
University. In 1982, I was appointed Professor to the Chair of English Language and
Linguistics, setting up the new Department of English Philology at the same institution
where I have been working for 41 years until my retirement in 2017.
I have been Head of the English Department during the first eleven years of the
Department’s life. First President and co-founder of the Spanish Association for Applied
Linguistics (AESLA). Member of the Executive Board of the International Association for
Applied Linguistics (AILA). Member of the International Committee of AILA. Murcia first
coordinator of the Erasmus/ Socrates network between our department and the universities
of Essex, Lille, Staffordshire, Lyon III, Nanterre, Free University of Berlin, Kiel, Trier, Rostock,
John Moores (Liverpool) and University College Dublin. Director of several Extramural
courses at Murcia University, Director of several editions of a Summer Course in English
Phonetics for Teachers, Advisory Committee Member of the National Evaluation Agency of
Research Activity (CNEAI), etc.
My main areas of interest are Phonetics and Phonology. Most of my published work is in
the field of Spanish phonetics (Aspectos fonéticos y fonológicos de las vocales españolas) as
well as the phonetics and the phonology of English (La pronunciation del inglés RP para
hablantes de español, La pronunciación del inglés británico simplificada, El acento léxico
inglés, Systems for the phonetic transcription of English. Theory and texts, English Phonetics
for Spanish-Speaking University Students, etc. My research has focused on four specific
issues: the theoretical/empirical study of suprasegmentals from a contrastive perspective
(English /Spanish); the socio-phonetics of Spanish (the ongoing phonetic change in Murciano
and other peninsular accents), the phonetics/phonology of interlanguage, and the
teaching/learning of English as a foreign language. I have also had a long-standing interest in
stylistics and contrastive rhetoric as well as in approaches to student learning. I was the
chief investigator of the Interlingüística Research Group at Murcia University. In line with
my research interests, I taught English Phonetics and Intonation at an undergraduate level;
at a graduate level, I lectured for a while on Intonation and Pragmatics, and team-taught a
Seminar in Research Methods. For several years, I gave a course on Research Methods in
English Linguistics and Literature at Alcalá University. I am currently happily retired.