Teaching Pronunciation: A series of booknotes

Abstract

Teaching Pronunciation A series of booknotes Marianne Celce-Murcia, Guest Editor University of California, Los Angeles Department of TESL & Applied Linguistics Those who are genuinely concerned with facilitating the acquisition of oral proficiency in adult second language learners must—directly or indirectly—deal with pronunciation. Research on the oral proficiency of foreign teaching assistants (e.g., Hinofotis & Bailey, 1980) indicates that no matter how high individuals might score on the T O E F L (Test of English as a Foreign Language), their speech will not be readily comprehensible to native English speakers unless they have reached at least a threshold level in their pronunciation. Their ability to produce appropriate stress and intonation patterns fluently, as well as reasonably accurate sound segments, is what contributes to their attaining at least this pronunciation threshold. In other words, non-native teaching assistants must control English pronunciation at the discourse level to be readily comprehensible. Ironically, within the Communicative Approach to language teaching, which was developed on the premise that the primary objective of language instruction should be communication, there had been very little attention given to the teaching of pronunciation, that is, until recently. Two volumes edited by Morley (1987, 1994) and a set of more than a dozen pronunciation textbook reviews in the T E S O L Quarterly (Samuda, 1993) suggest that there is renewed interest and attention being given to the teaching of pronunciation. These publications also highlight the availability of new classroom material for this purpose. In Spring 1995 I taught a course in practical phonetics for prospective E S L teachers at U C L A using the above materials and another resource in prepublication form (i.e., Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 1996). Several of the students in the course chose to write book reviews on pronunciation textbooks or teacher reference books for teaching pronunciation which were not part of, or were published subsequent to, the set of book notices edited by Samuda. The four reviews below, along with Samuda (1993), provide an overview of materials that are now available for teaching pronunciation in the E S O L classroom. We can only hope that the current spurt of publishing activity will continue since communicatively-based materials for teaching pronunciation are still the exception rather than the rule. Issues in Applied Linguistics © Regents of the University of California ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 7 No. 1 1996 172-177