Graduation Thesis ★ June 6

Why do we need to teach pronunciaiton?

Almost all English laguage teachers get students to study grammar and vocabulary, practise functional dialogues, take part in productive skills, and become competent in listening and reading. Yet some of the same teachers make little attempt teach pronunciation in any overt way and only give attention to it in passing. It is possible that they are nervous of dealing with sounds and intonation; perhaps they feel they have too much to do already and pronunciation teaching will only make things worse. They may claim that even without a formal pronunciation syllabbus, and without specific pronunciation teaching, many students seem to acquire　serviceable ponunciatin in the course of their studies.

However, the fact that some students aｒe able to acquire resonable pronunciation without overt pronunciation teaching should not blind us to the benefit of a focus on pronunciation in our lessons. Pronunciation teaching not only makes students awere of different sounds and sound features, but can also improve their speaking immeasurably. Concentrating on sounds, showing where where they are made in the mouth, making students aware of where wods should be stresses - all these things give them extra information about spoken English and help them achieve the goal of improved comprehension and intelligibility.

In some particular cases pronunciation help allows students get over serious intelligibility problems. I had taken English courses called English as a second language in the United States and the professor was able to help Cantonese, Korean, Japanese speakers of English achieve considerably greater intelligibility by working on our point of articulation. With other language groups it maybe a problem of the degree to whichspeakers do or do not open their mouths. Other language groups may have trouble with intonation o stress patterns in phrases and sentenses, and there are many individual sounds wchich cause diffeiculty for different first language speakers.

For all peaple, being made aware of pronunciation issues will be of immense benefit not only to their own production, but also to their own understanding of spoken English. Of course for Japanese junior high school English learners teaching pronunciation is very beneficial.

Referece：
Harmer, J. (2004). The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman.