چکیده:
This study aims to represent the developing status of pronunciation teaching and presents the current perspectives on pronunciation learning and teaching, coupled with innovative approaches and techniques/activities. It is argued that pronunciation teaching methodologies have changed over decades since the Reform Movement. The exact status of teaching pronunciation appeared first in the Audio Lingual Methods and continued in the Communicative Language Teaching methods; however, the ways of teaching pronunciation have explicitly a long history. In this study, the researcher scrutinizes the most influential factors in pronunciation learning, the knowledge of which can by and large facilitate both the teaching and the acquisition of pronunciation. Next, the focus of the article will be placed mainly on pronunciation intelligibility as a more realistic purpose of pronunciation pedagogy and instruction. Additionally, the article discusses a number of suggestions for teaching pronunciation and indicates that the teaching of pronunciation can be made more effective and facilitative in the EFL classrooms by offering some state-of-the-art teaching approaches to pronunciation convenient to EFL environment, along with a set of diverse techniques/activities. Finally, the study outlines the current innovative approaches and gives new insights into pronunciation instruction.
خلاصه ماشینی:
In parallel to a gradual move within the field of language acquisition, with putting greater emphasis on learner and learning-centered classroom rather than teacher and teaching-centered one, a drastic shift from specific linguistic competencies to broader communicative competencies has emerged as goals for teachers and students in which four dimensions of communicative competence are identified: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence ( Morley, 1991; Canale & Swain, 1980).
As for linguistic elements, it is evident that nonnative speakers can successfully develop native-like proficiency in speaking sub-skills such as in vocabulary, grammar, pragmatics, and the like; pronunciation is one critical field most learners have severe difficulty with regarding the significant impact of learner’s mother tongue, age, attitude, motivation, etc (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 1996).
In the Direct method, originated in late 1800s and early 1900s, pronunciation was considered an important component; albeit, the methodology for teaching pronunciation was not rigorously nurtured and was primitive: The teacher is ideally a native or near-native speaker of the target language presenting pronunciation inductively and correcting through modeling, meanwhile, learners are to listen meticulously and do their utmost to reproduce the sounds through imitation and repetition (Celce-Murcia et al.
Focus on Intelligibility as a More Realistic Goal The pronunciation goals and needs of adult English language learners are diverse depending on a variety of factors including: the use of language, the learners’ purpose and setting, their motivation to sound native-like, the frequency with which they speak English (Flege, Frieda, & Nozawa, 1997; Gatbonton, Trofimovich, & Magid, 2005; Moyer, 2008).