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Definitely a bit late to the party here, but I'm really glad I was exposed to these ideas. As a relatively inexperienced teacher, I never realised we even had the option of not teaching /d/ or /t/ endings or /s/ or /z/ for third person singular (having said that, I'm glad if my Portuguese/Spanish speaking students remember to use it in the first place instead of "he walk to school"...). I tend to agree with people who think it's understood either way, except of course when the extra syllable /ɪd/ is added, because without that, people can't understand if the verb is on present or past, so it affects intelligibility.

Personally I'm never sure about the rising/falling intonation with question tags and certainty/uncertainty. I think it's just the level of uncertainty you have, isn't it? Why would I use question tags if I didn't want a confirmation of my statement?

Regarding Hancock's article on creating authentic listening materials:
If you create authentic materials using Audacity, do share 😉
Although we do have the Real Lives Real Listening series, which does just this, but I think I'd get better quality authentic material of I recorded friends in a pub. Real Lives Real Listening seems like it deliberately recorded people who mutter and they didn't bother mastering or correcting volume.

Eszter

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When I first started learning Spanish, it was fairly informally.
Although I was attending a class, most of my practice came from dealing with the real world: buying cigarettes and vegetables. As a student in a pre-determined level class, you are catered for accordingly but as a person in a queue, you are simply that - no efforts are made to aid your understanding of the interaction. And this makes me consider the importance of speaking fluently with perfect local, regional or national accent. Yes, for the speaker, it can be rewarding to have someone observe and comment on the authenticity of your accent, but it is simply a boon. The elementary level student can also feel that very same way on completion of the most basic interaction.
Intelligibility is, for me, the most important aspect of any language. If a non-native speaker does enough to help a native speaker meet them somewhere half way in a conversation, the inevitable slips in pronunciation or intonation or sentence stress matter little. However, if the non-native speaker has simply abandoned their responsibility of producing intelligible words or sentences, the interaction is doomed.
So, do we strive for RP or intelligibility? Honestly, I'd be ashamed to produce a class of RP speaking students. Maybe not ashamed but certainly disappointed to have missed the opportunity to share  Hiberno-English and the Irish accent. It's part of the student experience, to have the chance to absorb from the world around them.

To that end, Yes - I do love teaching the /th/s.
I don't see why we can strive for good diction without descending into the RP debate. It's also nice to heat that your Korean/Japanese/etc student is THinking about the weekend and not worried about an unlikely boating accident.
The process of how to teach the above also serves to remind the students that they are using or supposed to be using parts of the mouth they've never used before - it's OK!
Is it essential that Juan says he 'cookt' an emlette instead or 'cookED''?
Certainly not - but Juan might be an exam student and should be perhaps considering the important of the past participle in many English grammar points, as well as all those pesky adjectives.

Fergal

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With reference to the questionnaire, I do teach my students the /t/ and /d/ endings – not because it interrupts intelligibility necessarily, but it can create a block in understanding. For example, 'He's lived...' could easily sound like 'He's livid...' with the typical Brazilian pronunciation of 'ed' as /id/. Although we know that in a context someone with a good level of English or a native speaker would be able to discern what the meaning was.

Perhaps as John Hughes' says in his article, native speakers do need to shift gears in terms of their tolerance of pronunciation which may not adversely affect intelligibility. I totally agree that what might be easy to teach might not be easy to replicate. For instance, I was teaching vocabulary related to fears and phobias today. One of the phrases I wanted students to use was: " I'm afraid of..."  So we did choral drilling of the whole phrase and afterwards I asked a number of students to tel me what they were afraid of to check their pronunciation. What I got back from the third student I asked was "I'm a faid of..." – missing an 'r' – but I understood him, as did everyone else, and in a wider context I'm equally sure that someone on the street would have understood him.

So is it important? The pedant in me says yes, but I equally get why it's not something to get too worked up about unless it's a block to intelligibility.

In my peer observation a few weeks ago, I showed students how sentence stress (contrastive stress) is important for making your meaning clear. But, how often have we as native speakers or fluent speakers of English misheard or misunderstood another native/fluent speaker to comic effect? Maybe I just need to get my hearing checked!

Check out Peter Kay's Misheard Lyrics sketch – I know I've done it!

Ali

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I believe it is important to teach aspects of pronunciation such as /t/ /d/ for -ed endings as well as third person /s/ /z/. Learners will benefit from being able to identify these sounds because it makes it easier understand the verb and time and it is also important for them to be able (or at least try to) produce the sound themselves in order to be understood. Saying that though, I don’t think it is necessary for them to “perfect” these sounds to be understood.

Regarding linking in speech, I believe it is necessary to expose them to natural speech and point out elements of it. It will help both their listening comprehension and pronunciation skills. I really liked the idea of getting students to practice elements of connected speech by reading a text they have produced. I think it relieves a lot of stress caused by reading aloud while at the same time making it personal. Pronouncing sentences they have produced correctly may be much more motivating than using a text they are not necessarily interested in.

All in all, I think that the most important thing for students is intelligibility which is measured in a different way now, seeing as English is spoken by so many different nationalities in various parts of the world. I don’t think that course books should continue using RP, but that World Standard English should take its place.

Daphne

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English Pronunciation - Debates and Dichotomies

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English Pronunciation - Debates and Dichotomies

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For me, perhaps the most interesting and important point dealt with in the reading is the idea that students are likely to become aware of connected speech, but may not end up producing it. As John Hughes puts it, "students can distinguish but can't produce." Perhaps a good student will eventually be able to speak with native-like connected speech patterns, but this point highlights the fact that developing a receptive awareness of connected speech is more immediately useful to students, and therefore that perhaps teachers should tailor their teaching to put reception first in this regard. Mark Almond also put this well when he says that students should be aiming for "comfortable intelligibility" in terms of production, but should eventually be able to comprehend "rapid colloquial native and non-native speech" in receptive skills. The key idea again is that, in general, there's usually going to be a gap between a students receptive and productive skill, and that a teacher should design their lessons and expectations around that.

Mark Almond also makes some interesting points about the role of error in class, in his article "Problems with bowels." He talks about the idea that the teacher can joke a little with the students about potentially-embarrassing errors made in class. As he puts it, no matter what language is being studied, everyone is "bound to make mistakes with pronunciation," so teachers should point out some of these potentially embarrassing/funny errors, while being sensitive to not embarrassing the student in class. I find myself agreeing with him, and generally try to help students aware of the fact that errors are just that, and that they shouldn't take correction personally or be embarrassed about it. I also make reference to previous student errors in my class (similarly to Almond), and often in a lighthearted manner. For example, to highlight the common Brazilian error of putting the "ch" sound where they shouldn't, I mentioned a student i once had that called me "cheetcher," something many students found amusing. Now, in my current class, a corrected student will often say "cheecher" and laugh, demonstrating their awareness that these mistakes are not personal mistakes but mistakes that are common within a particular language group. If a teacher can manage to develop this kind of rapport (and it can be difficult - we must be sensitive and aware of students' feelings) it can be invaluable, because students become less sensitive to being corrected, and more importantly, they become more aware of common pronunciation errors and errors in general. It's a win-win.

Anyway, these were just a few thought on the readings. I hope my colleagues will let me know if they agree or disagree, and how their in-class experience might be similar or different.

Tom

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Dichotomies Questionnaire

I know Billy won't agree with me here but I don't really teach /d/ or /t/ prounciation for -ed endings. I don't even pronounce them myself. I've thought students to simply Not add a syllable if past tense form doesn't end  in d or t.  Just say watcht or waychd, no extra syllable. Another one I don't teach is /s/ or /z/ for third person present simple.

I think intelligibiliy is an important issue and many grammatical forms we once thought were sacred, are now considered unimportant for understanding and comprehension.

I think the World Standard English should be standardised and implemented in every course book. The problem is that corporations like Cambridge propagate imperialist RP nonsense as a given instead of taking a more descriptive and pragmatic approach to English prounciation.

Patrick