ABSTRACT
Although English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) learners are motivated by a wide range of academic, employment and social goals, at the most basic level they all want to communicate more comprehensibly in English. To this end, many ESL and EFL students register for grammar and vocabulary classes. However, even though students may spend hours mastering grammatical structures and memorizing vocabulary words, one of the most crucial aspects of second language communication is comprehensible pronunciation. After all, it doesn’t matter how large students’ personal word banks may be or how accurate and complex their grammatical structures are if their pronunciation is difficult to understand. Simply put, while other linguistic challenges may make a spoken exchange difficult, incomprehensible pronunciation can literally stop a conversation. It is for this reason that most language teachers and students agree that acquiring intelligible pronunciation is a vital part of learning a new language. Despite the central role that intelligible pronunciation plays in successful communication, it is often sidelined in ESL and EFL classrooms. Teachers devote curricular space to the study of grammar and vocabulary, even while pronunciation may be marginalized. Some reasons for its marginalization include the lack of consistent attention to pronunciation in ESL and EFL textbooks, the inadequacy of pronunciation preparation in teacher training programmes and the dearth of stand-alone pronunciation courses available to many ESL and EFL students. However, this challenging situation provides an interesting opportunity in English language teaching to approach pronunciation as an integral component of communication rather than as an afterthought. This chapter reviews ways of incorporating attention to pronunciation in the teaching of other skills, including grammar and vocabulary, with special attention to connections to the teaching of both derivational and inflectional morphology in ESL and EFL classrooms.
