Rethinking the teaching of pronunciation in the ESL classroom

Being able to speak English includes a number of skills, involving vocabulary, grammar, pragmatics, and so on. It can be argued that by far, the most important of these skills is pronunciation. Despite having a good grasp of vocabulary and the grammatical rules of the English language, speakers would be unintelligible if they had poor pronunciation. Though pronunciation is an aspect of language that is difficult to acquire, the reality is that in many English language classrooms, teaching pronunciation is granted the least attention. When ESL teachers defend the poor pronunciation skills of their students, their arguments could either be described as a cop-out with respect to their inability to teach their students proper pronunciation or they could be regarded as taking a stand against linguistic imperialism. This paper begins by discussing these views and will then outline the current status of pronunciation teaching from the viewpoint of several experienced English language teachers. Some information regarding the nature of second language pronunciation and the needs of the ESL teacher for teaching pronunciation, with particular focus on material selection and teaching methodology will be provided. Finally, this paper makes a number of recommendations as to how the teaching of pronunciation can be made more effective in the ESL classroom