Here are four reasons to teach pronunciation. They are powerful because they cover all language activity; the physicality of pronunciation; the psychological impact of pronunciation
1.. Pronunciation applies to all four skills. Pronunciation is not just part of speaking aloud. Pronunciation is active whenever the inner voice is active, when rehearsing a phrase internally, when writing, and even when thinking. And remembering a phone number. Pronunciation is active even when reading silently. In fact pronunciation is active during all 4 skills as well as during thinking and remembering.
2.. Pronunciation improves listening. The mouth teaches the ear. Learning pronunciation ‘in the mouth’ improves discrimination ‘in the ear’. Pronunciation is in the ear as well as the mouth. According to the behavourist view of language learning the ear teaches the mouth, so that listening comes before speaking. But the mouth also teaches the ear. You know this from when you have learned to make a new pronunciation and suddenly you find you can hear it clearly. Or when you have learnt to say a rapid colloquial expression such as wassatime (what’s the time) or owjado (how d’you do) or angonamini (hang on a minute) and find you can suddenly hear it clearly. What the mouth can say becomes accessible to the ear to hear.
3.. Pronunciation is the physical aspect of language. It is the result of muscular coordination, and is not so different from learning dance, or other physical learning. Grammar, vocabulary and meaning are often taught cognitively, but pronunciation is physical. Use the natural muscular memory of the body to provide memory hooks for words and phrases. And to provide the experience of living the language and bringing it to life.
4.. Pronunciation affects self esteem. The impact of feeling a more competent speaker AND a more competent listener gives a sense of capability, a taste of potential mastery. All learners are capable of modifying their pronunciation in order to be better understood, to better understand, and perhaps to better enjoy the new language. Learners often have a good sense of areas of L2 pronunciation they are avoiding. When they find that even the teacher does not know how to help them they may feel it is an impossible task….
And the fifth reason – out of the four reasons to teach pronunciation – is that there is a different and new approach to teaching pronunciation, and that is what this website is about.
Hi Adrian!
First of all, thanks a lot for another great post and sorry for being slow to respond! I totally agree with everything you wrote here. Pronunciation is not an isolated area of the language, and it’s not a kind of topping to go with your English cake (spelling is much more ‘superficial’, I would say, and yet everybody cares about it!).
I could suggest that one of the reasons pronunciation is the Cinderella of language teaching is that we don’t have any adequate tools to motivate our students to do pronunciation work, esp. low-level adults. How exactly can we enable the students to discover the set of ideas from the posting above, esp. when we don’t want / find it impossible to lecture them? For me that is the key question at the moment.
Best wishes,
Michael
PS: I’ve just discovered an interesting #ELTChat on . It takes some time to read, but I think it’s worth looking at.
Yes thanks for this Michael, as you say …Pronunciation is not an isolated area of the language… to which I would add that maybe what makes it a bit different is precisely its physicality, in contrast to the cognitivity (?) of our treatment of the other language systems. And it is our failure to work properly with that physicality which I think contributes to the problems around pron teaching and learning, and this isolates it. You make a nice comparison with spelling, saying how every one cares about spelling. Yes exactly, and perhaps in a way this bears out my point: spelling is nicely cognitive and neatly wrong or right, so it conforms to our preferences about teaching and learning styles.
For you and I’m sure for a huge number of teachers the key questions with pron boil down to How do you motivate language learners to do pronunciation work? I propose that we do have the tools, but we don’t recognise them. What are peoples’ experiences about this? It would be good to hear, and I will post something about my own experience on this in the next few days.
Thanks Adrian and Michael for your posts. I really think that the fact that pronunciation is physical is the reason why it is so attractive for my students. It’s a liberation from the cognitive approach. The games included in Sound Foundation are brilliant. My students love playing hangman (a great way to revise all the sounds) and also trying to work out in groups the phonemic transcript of some words. For exam reasons, they deliver every month an oral presentation. Part of my feedback consists of giving them a list of words for which they have to find the transcript. I like students to feel the sounds of each word and for that I encourage them to shout, whisper and exagerate as much as possible. I feel that by doing that they grasp better the sounds and at the same time is more fun. Fun is vital. I think that all real learning is emotional, not so much cognitive.