Alison McGregor and Sarah Strigler

Consider the following student-teacher interactions based on a process versus nonprocess-oriented approach to teaching. A student in a writing class says to the teacher, “My essay is awful.” The experienced writing teacher replies, “Where are you in the process?”, basing the next step of feedback or instruction on the student’s stage in the writing process. Imagine the same student in a pronunciation class saying, “My pronunciation is terrible.” Teachers might respond with: “It takes time” or “What are you having difficulty with?” Though well intended, these types of reactions fail to create buy in to a pronunciation learning process with doable stages and steps. What if teachers’ reactions shifted to “where are you in the pronunciation process?” and teachers trained their students to independently use a pronunciation process approach to target skill development?

In this article, we put forth the need for and value in approaching pronunciation teaching and learning as a systematic yet dynamic process that can be sequenced to create an instructional roadmap. We propose five fundamental building blocks: assessing needs, prioritizing speech features, explicit information, developing skills, and feedback. This is not intended to be a conclusive list of all aspects of a pronunciation process but rather a general guide for instruction and a catalyst for discussion on the need for process in pronunciation teaching and learning.

1. Needs Assessment

A systematic pronunciation processstarts by assessing actual pronunciation needs. In practice, a teacher can use precreated materials (Gilbert, 2012) and/or customize the focus of the assessment for students’ first language, proficiency level(s), textbook, and/or course learning or performance objectives. These assessment results enable the teacher to identify pronunciation strengths and weaknesses for each student individually (Derwing & Munro, 2015) and the class as a whole.

To further raise learners’ awareness of their needs, teachers can include students’ self-assessment activities within a needs assessment. Guiding students to record, listen to, and assess their own speech is a simple but eye-opening task as learners often fail to realize how they sound in English. Improving self-awareness of pronunciation needs will have a direct and positive impact on the students’ motivation to engage in pronunciation practice.

The results of the needs assessment make pronunciation challenges evident and concrete. For teachers and students, results highlight pronunciation strengths and weaknesses with increased student awareness of the areas for improvement. Once targets are clearly established, the next step will be to prioritize which speech features to tackle first.

2. Prioritization

Let’s face it—prioritizing is messy and complicated business. However, after assessing needs, the next logical step in a pronunciation process is sequencing a plan of attack for those speech features and/or characteristics that pose the greatest need. The goal in prioritization is tocreate a hierarchy among speech features, considering individual needs, importance to intelligibility, and course objectives. This requires teachers to get organized at multiple levels in order to guide learners on what to work on first, what to pay attention to within a specific activity or task, and the overall coverage of pronunciation targets throughout a course.

For students, having clear targets directs attention and focus throughout the learning process, promoting incremental improvement as needed. At a beginning level, priorities might focus initially on sounds based on needs assessment and functional load (Munro & Derwing, 2006), syllable structure, and word-level stress to build a foundation for production; for more advanced students with strong foundational skills, thought groups, phrase-level stress, and overall intonation patterns could be higher priorities. Without the structure provided by prioritization, the pronunciation component of a curriculum will lack the intentional and systematic design necessary for effective pronunciation improvement.

3. Explicit Information

Once pronunciation priorities have been established, it is necessary to gather information on target speech features. Teachers cannot teach what they do not know, and students cannot be expected to perform a feature that they do not know exists, do not understand, or, as is often the case, cannot perceive.

For teachers, explicit information can be thought of as providing content knowledge about pronunciation features and the pedagogical techniques used to explain or demonstrate them. A key in providing explicit information is expressing phonetic and phonological knowledge at an accessible level for the student. For the student, explicit information enables a clear understanding of how to make specific speech features and their unique characteristics. It allows the student to understand “what am I doing” versus “what am I supposed to be doing.”

4. Skill Development

At this point in the process, focus turns to engaging strategically in production practice. This means creating a roadmap for students to move step-by-step through the stages of skill development in order to achieve competency. It requires instructors to identify the students’ level of competence in order to design and scaffold level-appropriate instruction. Taking the example of teaching a sound—can the learner perceive the sound; understand what to do to make the sound; make the sound in isolation; and then make the sound in a syllable, then in a word and in different positions within a word, then in a phrase or sentence within a contextualized discourse? Depending on the students’ development within these stages, the teacher can effectively initiate and craft instruction.

For the student, skill development entails actively producing and effectively practicing the target features step-by-step. By engaging in scaffolded skill development, students experience incremental levels of success, which triggers increased motivation and continued efforts to attain their desired level of competence.

5. Feedback

A pronunciation process approach clarifies the role of feedback once needs, prioritization, explicit information, and a level of skill development have been established since these all factor directly into decision-making about corrective feedback. Teachers also need to be familiar with types of feedback and timing—when to give it, how to give it, and also what the student should do with the feedback. For teachers, the goal of feedback is to create a consistent loop to communicate what is going well and what to add or change. For students, feedback provides direction on what they are doing accurately and what to alter in speech features to improve intelligibility. Ultimately, feedback reveals pronunciation needs to both teachers and students, thereby restarting the entire process.

If we think of pronunciation as a learning process, we shift decision-making to a tangible sequence of building blocks. Table 1 reviews process-oriented questions for pronunciation teaching and learning. The process informs teaching decisions for instructors (see McGregor & Reed, 2018) and learning decisions for students to cocreate a successful pronunciation plan.

Table 1. A Process-Oriented Pronunciation Checklist for Teacher and Students

Conclusion

Without a process, pronunciation teaching and learning can seem frustrating and demotivating. By contrast, adopting a process approach to pronunciation instruction philosophically grounds it in a growth mindset, a belief that a skill can be developed through dedication and hard work. This gives agency to both teachers and students to engage in a teaching and learning process that makes pronunciation development systematic, ongoing, and achievable work. Using thewriting process as a model, let’s catapult pronunciation teaching and learning into the realm of process improvement. The next time a student comes to you with pronunciation challenges, embrace a skill development process approach and ask, “Where are you in the pronunciation process?”

References

Derwing, T. M., & Munro, M. J. (2015). Pronunciation fundamentals: Evidence-based perspectives for L2 teaching and research. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Gilbert, J. (2012). Clear speech: Teacher's resource and assessment book (4th ed.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

McGregor, A., & Reed, M. (2018). Integrating pronunciation into the English language curriculum: A framework for teachers. The CATESOL Journal, 30(1), 69–94.

Munro, M., & Derwing, T. (2006). The functional load principle in ESL pronunciation instruction: An exploratory study. System, 34(4), 520–531.

Alison McGregor teaches at Princeton University, where she specializes in oral proficiency skills for international graduate students. Alison holds a PhD in educational psychology from The University of Texas at Austin, and her research focuses on effective pronunciation instruction and English intonation.

Sarah Strigler is an ESL instructor at The University of Texas at Austin and specializes in teaching academic writing to international graduate students. She develops innovative approaches to academic writing instruction and researches writing feedback and self-monitoring techniques.