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To teach pronunciation effectively, you need several types of knowledge:

• You need to know the facts about pronunciation: How speakers’ mouths move when they produce the sounds of language, and how word stress, rhythm, connected speech, and intonation work.

• You need to understand and be able to predict the kinds of problems your students might have with pronunciation and why they happen.

• You need to know many ways to teach pronunciation to your students, adapting your methods to fit them and their needs, and helping them practice effectively to overcome any problems they might have (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010).

You also need to know these basic principles of teaching pronunciation:

• Include more than just “repeat after me.” Having students listen to a recording or to the teacher’s voice and then repeat is a useful part of a pronunciation lesson, but by itself it is not enough.

• Encourage students to use more than one of their senses, which is more effective anyway. We can use many different ways of learning—through sight, sound, and movement—to help students understand and remember better.

• Keep lessons practical. For most students, even adults, theory and technical explanations are hard to understand and are easily forgotten.

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Spelling: English has many words with irregular or unpredictable spellings, and this can lead students to mispronounce those words. For example, if students learn the words rain, plain, and maintain, they will naturally assume that the letters ain must represent /eyn/. Then if they see the written word mountain, they may mistakenly pronounce it /mawnteyn/. Since students often meet words first in their written form, this can lead to incorrect pronunciation of many words.

Borrowed words: Many languages have borrowed words from English, adapting their pronunciation to fit the sound system of the borrowing language. (Sometimes the meanings of the words have also changed, but that’s a separate issue.) For example, Table 1.1 shows some Japanese words borrowed from English and the sound changes they’ve undergone in the process.

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Effects of Differences Between First Language and Second Language: What happens when learners hear and try to pronounce strange, new sounds in a new language? These types of problems often occur.

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Effects of Differences Between First Language and Second Language: What happens when learners hear and try to pronounce strange, new sounds in a new language? These types of problems often occur.

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Merging:  When learners hear unfamiliar sounds in a new language, they tend to interpret the sounds of the new language in terms of the categories of their original language. The learner’s brain may hear two sounds as being the same when they’re actually considered separate sounds in the new language. This is called merging and leads to pronunciation errors.

Substitution:  When learners hear a new sound that doesn’t match any of the sounds they know, they often substitute a familiar sound that is somewhat similar and easier for them to produce. For example, the first sound in think and three is found in relatively few languages in the world. Speakers of languages that don’t have this sound often substitute /s/, /f/, or /t/ so that think sounds like sink, fink, or tink.

The effect on intelligibility: The processes of substitution and merging can cause serious problems for learners’ intelligibility. When listeners expect to hear one sound but actually hear a different one, communication can break down. Even when teachers make learners aware of what’s happening, it’s difficult not to fall into one of these traps

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The Pendulum Swings Over the years, styles of language teaching have changed greatly, and the same is true of teaching pronunciation. In some time periods, teaching pronunciation has been considered extremely important, while at other times it hasn’t been given much attention at all. Trends in teaching pronunciation are like a swinging pendulum—the emphasis goes from one extreme to the other. Until recently, the focus in pronunciation teaching was almost entirely on producing individual sounds and words correctly; not much attention was given to features such as intonation and rhythm. (You’ll read about these things in Chapters 8 to 12.) In the last 20 years or so, however, teachers and researchers have begun to realize the importance of these “musical” aspects of pronunciation and to emphasize them more strongly in teaching (CelceMurcia et al., 2010; Goodwin, 2001). Some scholars have gone so far as to claim that teaching

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Many things contribute to learning pronunciation, from students’ ages, motivation, and personality—which depend on the learners themselves—to the quality of the teaching and the students’ first language—which are outside factors. The Age of the Learner We’ve all observed how easily babies and very young children learn languages. They just seem to absorb the sounds and words they hear around them and, little by little, learn to imitate them accurately. Linguists call this time in a child’s life, lasting up to the age of about 12 to 14 years, the critical period for language acquisition.

Many things contribute to learning pronunciation, from students’ ages, motivation, and personality—which depend on the learners themselves—to the quality of the teaching and the students’ first language—which are outside factors. The Age of the Learner We’ve all observed how easily babies and very young children learn languages. They just seem to absorb the sounds and words they hear around them and, little by little, learn to imitate them accurately. Linguists call this time in a child’s life, lasting up to the age of about 12 to 14 years, the critical period for language acquisition.

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We often think of pronunciation teaching in terms of helping students achieve accurate pronunciation so that their production of sounds, stress, rhythm, and intonation begins to match an ideal pattern. But accuracy is only one part of good pronunciation. Fluency in producing sounds and other aspects of pronunciation is equally important. The two don’t always go together. For example, many students learn to produce a new sound correctly when they’re concentrating carefully and saying it alone or in a single word. When they need to use that same sound in conversation, however, it’s much more difficult to keep producing it correctly—they can’t pronounce the sound fluently. After all, in real-world speaking, pronunciation is just one among many things that students have to think about. Vocabulary, grammar, the ideas they want to express, and the appropriate degree of politeness and formality also occupy their attention.

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Most teachers agree that they want their students to be able to speak English with good pronunciation. But what does that mean? What is good pronunciation? One answer might be “sounding like a native speaker.” However, this answer is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, it’s hard to define what “a native speaker” sounds like. There are so many varieties of English and so much variation within each type that it’s almost impossible to define that elusive “ideal” pronunciation.

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There are many things that English teachers need to fit into their limited class time—grammar, vocabulary, speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Pronunciation often gets pushed to the bottom of the list. Many teachers say there’s just not enough time to teach pronunciation.
Depending on where you teach, many or all of your students will need to speak and understand English in real life to communicate with both native speakers of English and speakers of other languages. Even if students’ grammar and vocabulary are strong, if their pronunciation isn’t easy to understand, their communication will fail. We owe it to our students to give them the tools they’ll need to be able to communicate successfully in English.