ABSTRACT
Until the turn of the twenty-first century, the topic of second language pronunciation had been marginalized in the larger disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition and often treated as a sub-skill of speaking. Historically, research in L2 pronunciation has largely focused on the pronunciation of individual vowels and consonants, treating the speech stream as a sequence of discrete segments. Pronunciation has been described as comprising an increasingly complex building-block structure, for example moving from sounds to syllables to phrases and finally to extended discourse. The sound–spelling correspondence adds another layer of complexity to the task of teaching English pronunciation since connections between sounds and spelling in English are less transparent in comparison with many other languages and are often perceived by learners as opaque or seemingly contradictory. The nature of pronunciation's role across different varieties of English needs to be addressed. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
