Phonological Theory: Between the Hammer of the Effective Role It Plays in Teaching English and the Anvil of English-Course Teachers' Reluctance to Adopt It at the Tertiary Level

Abstract

Many English courses at the tertiary level are inaptly overlaid with language skills with the bare minimum of phonological and pronunciation ones. They are, in fact, merely lame attempts made to create as comprehensive, integral and perfect proficiency in English as possible from which learners would dubiously benefit. The purpose underlying this paper is to move on pronunciation skills and items from its narrow role played in English syllabus design into a newer and broader context that relevantly meets students' perspective needs of linguistic intelligibility. The absence, albeit the exclusion, of phonological theory from English courses implicitly leads to an untenable situation in which learners' goal of learning English is no longer communicative but rather becomes entirely individually oriented. The paper seeks to detect both the points of weakness and strength in light of the availability of phonological skills in two English courses taught in University of Petra/Jordan. One of the influential results reached by the paper is that phonological skills are not only basic components in any English-course syllabi, but they also form integrity with other linguistic ones.