Man it can be hard to find the time to blog in the summer! My goal in the next few weeks is to find a few more moments of quality time with WordPress, and also to read up on the state of pronunciation teaching. I’ll most likely be teaching a speaking and pronunciation course for graduate students in the fall, and want to have it focus more heavily on the latter than the former. So I thought it could be a good moment to see if we’ve progressed past the days of “popsicle-stick in the mouth to feel the difference between /l/ and /ɹ/”. (Maybe we haven’t! And I’m ok with that.)

I’m going to start by checking out the following:

Towards Better Teaching of Pronunciation: Review of Literature in the Area

Abstract:

The present paper aims at establishing the need to focus on the importance of teaching pronunciation to language learners. The study is descriptive in nature. It traces out the body of research concerning the weightiness of pronunciation within linguistic, psychological, and sociocultural domains as well as through the eyes of the language learners. The findings highlighted the knock-on effects of pronunciation on the four language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). In addition, pronunciation instruction was found to be the learners’ priority and a field in which they need more coaching. As an illuminating study, the paper is useful to teachers, researchers, and material writers to consider the language learners’ needs in the English language teaching and learning context.

Seyedabadi, S., Fatemi, A. H., & Pishghadam, R. (2015). Towards Better Teaching of Pronunciation: Review of Literature in the Area. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 6(4 S1), 76.

I will let you know how I fare! And then the search will begin for good pronunciation teaching resources…though I’m sure there’s no shortage of those.