ABSTRACT

This chapter is to a great extent based on the author's decades of experience teaching at the university level in Taiwan; however, most suggestions have wide application and can be easily tailored to individual situations and needs elsewhere. For example, first language (L1) influenced substitutions for certain vowels and consonants of English will differ according to the home country or region, but the principle of phoneme substitution remains the same. Teachers may find that this chapter challenges some of their personal notions about the role of pronunciation in language learning, or that it goes against the current of some recent schools of thought in pronunciation teaching. The chapter focuses on the popular notion of English for International Communication, or English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), in which 'intelligibility' is emphasized over attainment of native-like pronunciation as measured against one of the standard dialects of English such as General American (GA) or BE.