Issues in Teaching Pronunciation: Prosody, Intonation, and Vowels

Abstract

For various historical reasons, skill elements involved in the achievement of intelligible pronunciation have been largely neglected in both teacher training and applied research for almost 60 years. However, recently there has been a new momentum of attention to the subject of the spoken language. This chapter will outline developments in the field and then suggest efficient ways to improve students' pronunciation (and listening comprehension), paying attention to the teaching of three basic skills: the English prosodic way of conveying emphasis, how to say the peak vowels clearly, and how to guess from the spelling which vowel sound is correct.

Learner Awareness of the “Music” of Spoken English—Focus on Intonation—And Its Impact on Communicative Competence. Is Intonation Teachable and Learnable?

“…"Students who are taught about English prosodic patterns, often report improved understanding of speech that they hear on TV, in movies, and in face-to-face conversations …"-Judy Gilbert, (2008). Therefore, the authors of this research believe, and have observed during the research, that when students learn to "use" tones, they can "hear" them better as well, thereby enhancing their own speech perception, intelligibility, and comprehensibility among other aspects of spoken English.…”

Integrating Html5-Based Speech Recognition With Learning Management System to Enhance Efl Learners’ Pronunciation Skills

“…Critical decisions on how to create systematic and reliable EFL pronunciation instruction are necessary since it has not received any academic attention up to date. Although a comprehensive review of literature on pronunciation has given some insights into how its instruction and assessment have progressed in recent years, many challenges exist such as choosing the appropriate approach, time constraints, and the lack of confidence and training in this area, which all lead to pronunciation instruction neglection (Gilbert, 2008). Yet, the effects of CAPT on pronunciation teaching have just recently been studied and findings mainly demonstrate positive outcomes (Mahdi and Al Khateeb 2019).…”

“…The outcomes of these projects assisted in the improvement of participants' pronunciation, the development of instructional frameworks, techniques, and the production of instructional materials. Nevertheless, there is still a need for more material design and pedagogical variations with a solid curriculum as EFL learners of today demand contextualized and innovative learning activities with recent technological developments (Fraser 2000;Gilbert 2008). Another aspect of pronunciation that has not been explored much is the learners' perspective on the pronunciation instruction used by their teachers and their preference in teaching approach and testing (Alghazi 2015).…”

Creative drama English pronunciation program for Bhutanese primary learners

“…Pronunciation involves a multifaceted interactional factor that can be labelled in two types of features: segmental and suprasegmental features. Segmental deals with individual sounds of English and suprasegmental, also known as, prosody convey the whole meaning (Gilbert, 2018).…”

“…The dependency of two concepts of segmental and suprasegmental can be well explained using the prosody pyramid which is a visual description of related elements of pronunciation. Likewise, Gilbert (2018) states that combined concepts of segmental and suprasegmental should be taught for better quality English pronunciation.…”