ABSTRACT

The acquisition of pronunciation has received less attention from ISLA researchers and theorists than other linguistic areas such as grammar and vocabulary (Derwing & Munro, 2005). Nonetheless, pronunciation is an important component of linguistic communicative competence, and there is a body of research that has addressed this area of L2 acquisition (Lee, Jang, & Plonsky, 2014). In the 1970s and 1980s, pronunciation instruction was infl uenced by behaviorist theories of learning, which were manifested in ISLA by: (a) contrastive analysis, focusing on similarities and differences between the L1 and L2; and (b) audiolingual drills, entailing extensive amounts of correct repetition of phrases and sentences without much consideration of meaning. Pronunciation was an important aspect of both of these activities, exemplifi ed by the identifi cation of L1/L2 pronunciation sound contrasts (Jenkins, 2004) and the repetition of correct pronunciation through drills. Consequently, the current lack of emphasis on pronunciation in the classroom may have come in part as a reaction to the considerable amount of attention it previously received, at the expense of more meaning-focused classroom activities (Nation, 2011). Finally, the critical period hypothesis, which argues that there are biological and maturational constraints on adult L2 learning, has considerable adverse implications for L2 pronunciation, suggesting that native-like pronunciation may not be attainable for L2 learners unless they have started learning the L2 by the age of 6 or 7 (Long, 2007a). Indeed, some feel that the age of onset of learning is the most important constraint for pronunciation acquisition, and thus there may be little that can be done to facilitate adult L2 learning in this area (Moyer, 2011). Although these factors may partially explain the lack of large-scale pronunciation research, there are a number of researchers who have maintained an interest in the effects of instruction on the acquisition of pronunciation in the L2 classroom, arguing that age of onset of learning is not the only determining factor in learners’ pronunciation abilities.