ABSTRACT
The teaching of pronunciation, a mainstay of audiolingual teaching, fell into neglect at the beginning of the era of communicative language teaching (CLT) during the 1970s. Since then, pronunciation teaching has been slowly regaining a position of importance and is now seen as consistent with the general principles of CLT. This chapter traces how conceptions of pronunciation teaching have changed in response to the initial ascendancy and later hegemony of CLT. A marginalized role for pronunciation teaching grew out of research that pointed out the unlikelihood of native-like pronunciation attainment along with considerable specialist emphasis on the importance of developing learners’ communicative competence (as opposed to linguistic competence) alone. Early on, pronunciation was conceived of as serving linguistic competence and therefore accuracy, while CLT was viewed as promoted communicative competence and, therefore, fluency. According to this initial conception, pronunciation teaching was deemed unnecessary based on the assumption that it would take care of itself if language teaching proceeded with a focus on communication and fluency. Even though scholarly journals continued to regularly publish articles on pronunciation, its teaching was neglected within language classrooms and in the training of English language teachers. As CLT grew in influence in the 1980s and beyond, pronunciation practitioners were successful in regrouping and began to envision and propose a new role for pronunciation teaching. The new role they proposed called for a threshold level of intelligibility attainment (rather than native-like pronunciation), emphasized suprasegmentals rather than segmentals only, and advocated instructional practices that incorporated work on both fluency and accuracy. However, pronunciation teachers and researchers were essentially playing catch up during this period since pronunciation continued to occupy a marginalized position in classrooms. As this chapter will review, this marginalization began to change through the emergence of communicatively oriented pronunciation materials starting in the mid-1980s, increasing empirical research on pronunciation’s role in speech intelligibility, recognition that communication failures may often be traced to a lack of intelligibility, and the emergence of visible professional structures such as conferences and journals devoted to second language (L2) pronunciation and its teaching. The chapter’s core theme is that L2 teaching must also include a focus on form (including pronunciation) if L2 learning is to be fully successful.
