ABSTRACT

This chapter provides an overview of the history of pronunciation teaching, focusing specifically on the pre-communicative language teaching (CLT) era, in a way that should help teachers to better understand modern pronunciation teaching practices. Although current practices of pronunciation teaching and learning generally embrace a communicative approach, the fundamentals of pre-CLT approaches continue to have lasting influence on how pronunciation is taught today. Understanding these earlier approaches highlights a variety of different techniques and practices that continue to be foundational in many contemporary language classrooms. Concentrating mainly on the classical period (pre-1850s), the first wave (1850s–1880s) and the second wave (1880s–early 1980s) out of the four ‘waves’ of pronunciation teaching identified by Murphy and Baker (2015), the chapter examines the nitty-gritty of pronunciation pedagogy from a classroom teacher’s perspective: what were the tools of the trade and what did pronunciation teaching actually look like in the language classroom? Whenever possible, the chapter provides reports of pronunciation teaching from historical literature or from excerpts from language methodology textbooks to illustrate pronunciation instruction as situated in its historical context. This is a challenge, as relatively little empirical documentation beyond such sources remains. The chapter’s focus is on typical classroom practices, not on experimental work or practices of specialists.