ABSTRACT
Since the decline in popularity in the 1960s and 1970s of the Audio Lingual approach (ALM) to second language instruction, many new methods of teaching second and foreign languages have been introduced. Most of these more popular post-ALM second language methodologies can readily be classified as communicative approaches to second language acquisition. All of the communicatively based language teaching models have several major points of agreement: (1) they stress the meaningful use of a second language for the purposes of true communication in the classroom; (2) they require the presence of a maximally high amount of what Krashen (1981) called comprehensible input; (3) again in Krashen's terms, they stress the creation of a classroom environment that produces a maximally low affective filter. However, another common thread running through all communicatively based teaching methodologies is the fact that none of them makes any genuine effort to deal with the teaching of pronunciation in the second language classroom. Although none of them explicitly states that pronunciation is not to be taught, they do largely imply that by not including any type of pronunciation explanations or activities in their methodologies. Krashen (1985) commented in passing that speaking emerges on its own after the student has been exposed to comprehensible input and after a sufficient amount of acquisition has taken place. After a very brief discussion of pronunciation, Krashen and Terrell (1983, pp. 89-91) concluded ". . . we do not place undue emphasis in early stages on perfection in the students' pronunciation, but
1. INTRODUCTION
rather concentrate on providing a good model with large quantities of comprehensible input before production is attempted." It is particularly surprising that proponents of the so-called proficiency movement, although they place a great deal of emphasis on linguistic accuracy in the nascent stages of second language acquisition (to avoid what they term 'fossilization'), they include no provision for the teaching of pronunciation in the classroom (see, e.g., Omaggio, 1986). After surveying various communicative methodologies, Terrell arrived at the same conclusion: "Communicative approaches likewise have not known what to do with pronunciation" (Terrell, 1989, p. 197).
