RECOGNITION AND PRODUCTION EXERCISES IN PRONUNCIATION

Abstract

There a r e three kinds of students in foreign languages. First, those who describe foreign languages; second, those who teach foreign languages; third, those who learn to speak foreign languages. The first group must know about the foreign language but need not speak it. The third group must speak the foreign language but need not know about it. The second group should know about and speak the foreign language and the students‘ native language. This short art icle concerns primarily those of the second group. It a ims to show how the language teacher who speaks both languages has an important advantage over the one who does not in pronunciation exercises. A teacher of pronunciation must know the sound system and other pronunciation features in both the students’ native language and the foreign language. He must be able to predict what pronunciation problems his students are going to have and how to help them to recognize such problems so that they can overcome the difficulties. There a r e two major kinds of pronunciation difficulties. First, two phonetically similar i tems are used to distinguish meaning in the foreign language but a r e grasped by the student as equivalents because they are not used to distinguish meaning in his native language.’ The problem is phonemic. The student must learn to produce the two separate items. Second, the student substitutes an item in the foreign language by a different item from his native language. This substitution is unsatisfactory. Our question is what the teacher could do to achieve satisfactory pronunciation.