#72, Article: ‘Pronunciation – the poor relation?’ by Adrian Underhill

The point I want to make is that pronunciation teaching has been neglected and that we have all lost out through this. In spite of the development of interesting teaching materials by various people it remains the poor relation of language teaching, poorly related to the rest of what happens in the language classroom. I want to suggest two reasons why I think this is, and two corresponding ways of overcoming this and moving forward. In the second article I will pick up on the practical side of this and explore a strategy for action in the classroom, for laying the foundations of a mutually enriching integration of pronunciation with the rest of language. I intend to keep the concerns of NNS (non native speaker) teachers very much in mind, though I hope this will apply to pretty well everyone.

Is pronunciation the Cinderella of language teaching?
While much has changed in the last few decades in how we teach grammar, vocabulary, collocation, context and meaning I suggest that pronunciation is still rooted in an essentially behaviourist paradigm of listen, identify, discriminate and repeat. This is not wrong, simply insufficient, and so for most students and probably most teachers pronunciation remains a mysterious zone where the rules are not clear and it is difficult to make progress, or even to know if you have”

Read the complete article at http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles

2 comments

  1. yes, what Adrian pointed is true, the pronunciation teaching is neglected in especially southern parts of India.it is good thing if we, as English teachers concentrate on pronunciation teaching… Adrian did an excellent work…I congratulate the ELT EDITORS BOARD who has provided this opportunity … from Dr. adi rameshan

  2. I teach English pronunciation in the U.S. and I work with many professionals from India. Their English reading, vocabulary and grammar abilities are excellent. However, when it comes to spoken English they often need pronunciation training to learn the patterns of the oral language. These professionals are very motivated to study English pronunciation and acknowledge that they never learned this in their previous training.

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