ABSTRACT
With the transition in the late 1970s and early 1980s from direct method and audiolingual approaches to communicative language teaching (CLT), the field of second language (L2) pronunciation teaching entered an era of challenge. Pronunciation practitioners made concerted efforts to realign their classroom practices with emerging communicative approaches to language teaching (e.g. Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010), as did materials developers such as Morley (1979) and Gilbert (1984). This realignment of theory and practice resulted in fundamental changes to pronunciation teaching.
The first of these changes involved revisiting the idea, central to the then prevailing contrastive analysis hypothesis (see Tarone, 2013), that interference from the learner’s first language (L1) constituted the primary source of error in pronunciation. Instead, a recognition awakened that other factors (such as overgeneralization) also play a central role in L2 acquisition, including the acquisition of L2 pronunciation. Replacing the notion of L1 interference was that of L1 transfer, which could be either positive (i.e. in cases where the L1 and L2 share phonological features) or negative (i.e. in cases where the L1 lacks phonological features that are present in the L2).
Another change in pronunciation teaching was a shift in focus away from segmentals to suprasegmentals, i.e. in recognition of the importance of the latter in communicating overall meaning (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010). A clear leader in this movement was Gilbert, whose first edition of her ESL classroom textbook titled Clear Speech (1984) focused almost exclusively on suprasegmentals, thus breaking tradition with other student texts then on the market. Other authors of pronunciation classroom texts quickly followed suit, with the result that by the mid-1990s coverage of suprasegmental aspects became a standard feature in pronunciation course materials and texts. Today, pronunciation teaching has emerged from previous eras of rote drill and repetition. This chapter will highlight the juncture of research and emerging innovative practices in pronunciation pedagogy. These include but are not limited to means of increasing learner motivation and autonomy, multimodal approaches to pronunciation teaching, the increasing role of technology in today’s pronunciation practice, pronunciation priorities for lingua franca communication, and insights into the impact of rhythm, stress, and intonation on learners’ overall intelligibility.
