This article reviews notions of identity and teacher identity, how these relate to the specific characteristics of language teaching, and how teacher identity can evolve or be developed through experience and teacher education. The notion of teacher identity highlights the individual characteristics of the teacher and how these are integrated with the possibilities and potentials provided in the institutional identity of teacher and the content and methods of a specific field, as these are realized in specific contexts of teaching. The elements of a teacher identity in language teaching are derived from a review of literature on identity and described in terms of the foundational and advanced competences required for language teaching, as illustrated by excerpts from teacher narratives. The discussion concludes with recommendations for teacher education and professional development with a focus on identity.

In this reexamination of the status of pronunciation in language teaching, the traditional phonemic‐based view of pronunciation is contrasted with a broader, discourse‐based view comprising segmental, voice‐setting, and prosodic features. A description of the nature and interaction of these three aspects of pronunciation serves to raise issues which are then reviewed in a survey of research on the acquisition of pronunciation. Central issues are the influence of the first language, the acquisition processes operative in L2 phonology, psychosocial and individual factors, and the role of instruction. A broader focus on pronunciation in the context of discourse is suggested as the emphasis of both second language acquisition research and second language teaching. From this perspective the effects of voice setting, stress and intonation, as well as coarticulatory phenomena, assume greater importance for teaching. Pronunciation should be taught as part of the means for creating both referential and interfactional meaning, and not merely as an aspect of the oral production of words and sentences.

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The nature and functions of prosody are reviewed, and English and Cantonese are contrasted for this feature of language, as background for two experimental studies. In the experiments, 30 Cantonese speakers with advanced competence in English were tested for their recognition memory of English sentences in which prosody cued meaning contrasts in otherwise identical sentence pairs. The Cantonese speakers' memory for the English sentences based on prosodic information was generally poor, both when the contrastive focus was implicit in the experimental task (Experiment 1) and when it was the explicit focus of attention (Experiment 2). The only significant improvement in performance after participants' attention was explicitly directed to intonation was on sentences in which prosody cued a marked informational focus ("contrastive stress") versus an unmarked one ("neutral" sentence intonation). The investigation leads to suggestions for raising learners' awareness of prosody in a second language.