ABSTRACT
Because of the pride of place given to grammar together with the increasingly wider use of English as an international language there has been a tendency to place less and less importance on the teaching of pronunciation. There has been a sort of implicit assumption that the standard will be set by the teacher doing the teaching (combined with what the learner picks up from watehing English or American TV and film) and that learners will simply pick up their pronunciation, often with no explicit teaching of it at all. In many cases teachers know of no other model than Received Pronunciation or General American and, since this may be considered an unattainable standard, pronunciation teaching muddles through, coming sometimes near to, and sometimes far away from, these standard models.
