Mara Haslam, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

Pronunciation teaching has been called the “Cinderella” and “stepchild” of the English language teaching field (see Levis & Sonsaat, 2017) – teachers seem to focus on many other aspects of language such as grammar and vocabulary in their teaching, while pronunciation is often neglected. Teachers around the world seem to be either unaware of or unwilling to work with pronunciation, despite the fact that good pronunciation instruction can help students to increase their intelligibility and therefore their communicative competence. High-quality pronunciation teaching also has the possibility to improve other areas of English learning, such as vocabulary learning (e.g. perception of contrastive sounds helps to distinguish between lexical items), grammar (e.g. the three ways of pronouncing past-tense endings), and listening comprehension (e.g. listening for emphasized words to find the main idea). For these reasons, I believe that pronunciation teaching should be part of English instruction at all levels, starting at the very beginning.

In Sweden, schools are required by law to begin teaching English no later than the third grade; many schools start in first grade. In addition, English is a core subject, which means that all primary-school teachers need to learn how to teach English. However, pronunciation is not mentioned as a specific area of study until students reach upper secondary school, after they have already had up to 9 years of English instruction. Even when pronunciation is addressed, many teachers are working from outdated ideas around pronunciation such as that the native varieties American English and British English (RP) should be the only two possible targets, that students need to be consistent in their pronunciation and shouldn’t “mix” varieties, and that pronunciation is mostly about how individual sounds are pronounced rather than suprasegmentals.

Learners who have experienced these ideas then grow up to become teachers in the Swedish system. Despite the fact that the Swedish curriculum for English focuses heavily on overall communicative competence, a lack of specific mention of pronunciation in the Swedish curriculum for the lower grades may be a sign to teachers that pronunciation is not important until students reach the upper grades. Many of my teacher students also express a great deal of language anxiety around pronunciation, having had bad experiences with their pronunciation being corrected during their English lessons and are therefore apprehensive about teaching pronunciation themselves. Many report that their experiences with pronunciation instruction as learners amounted to anxiety-inducing round-robin reading activities where each student was required to read a sentence and then their pronunciation was corrected in front of the class. These factors combined create a vicious cycle in which pronunciation is not taught often, especially in the lower grades, and when pronunciation is taught, it’s subject to outdated and uninformed notions. My teacher students often share that they haven’t even considered that pronunciation might be important in learning English. Even teachers who may be interested in teaching pronunciation usually have few high-quality models to look to in their own experience.

As a teacher educator and a researcher focusing on pronunciation, I am interested in how to break this cycle of ignorance and apprehension – how can we help English learners in Sweden to receive quality pronunciation teaching that will help them meet their communicative goals? In the required teacher education program at Stockholm University, teachers of grades Pre-3 have only 15 credits (the equivalent of 10 weeks of full-time study) focused on teaching English and the teachers of grades 4-6 have 30 credits (the equivalent of 20 weeks of full-time study). During this time teacher students learn all they can about not only the structure of English but also how to teach and assess English. In this limited time frame it would be too extravagant to focus on a course entirely devoted to teaching pronunciation. Nevertheless, we have successfully integrated many concepts of pronunciation and pronunciation teaching into these courses.

At Stockholm University we have included pronunciation training for primary-school teachers as part of their English teacher education. This pronunciation training is primarily directed at the pronunciation of the teachers themselves, because good pronunciation is necessary to provide high-quality input to their learners. As part of this training, teacher students have the opportunity to learn about important concepts such as English as a Lingua Franca and the idea that some pronunciation issues are more significant than others. They reflect on their experiences as learners of pronunciation and have an opportunity to re-examine their beliefs about pronunciation in a reflection assignment. Each student also receives feedback on their pronunciation from their instructors with a prioritized list of aspects of pronunciation they can work on as an individual.

Students then practice pronunciation by participating in individual, whole-class, and paired pronunciation work. The individual work is guided by the feedback provided by instructors and supported by suggested exercises on perceptual websites such as englishaccentcoach.com and CALST, and a large online list of pronunciation videos and other resources curated by me. Students then also get the opportunity to participate in pronunciation workshops and paired activities where they receive pronunciation instruction that follows current best practices and allows them to practice in a number of communicative activities. We call the paired activities the “pronunciation pal” activity; pairs of students are required to meet each other outside of class, either in person or digitally, and work together through a set of well-designed communicative pronunciation activities. Students regularly report that these activities are both fun and educational. In their final assignments students often reflect that this pronunciation instruction has helped them to realize that pronunciation is important to communication.

Students have asked me “Why didn’t my teacher teach me about this?” when we learn about something such as the difference between [s] and [z] sounds (which are not contrastive in Swedish) and that there are different pronunciations for e.g. plural endings in English. I answer them that their teacher probably didn’t know about this difference. I then encourage them to share this information with their learners. This is simply one example of how I hope that knowledge of pronunciation will “trickle down” to learners. Teachers who are unaware of pronunciation as a possible learning target will obviously not include it in their instruction, but teachers who have received high-quality pronunciation instruction themselves will hopefully include similar pronunciation instruction in their teaching.

Here is a list of suggested ways that we can work with pre-service teachers to help them provide high-quality pronunciation instruction to their students, even when we don’t have a specific class that focuses on pronunciation instruction:

• Provide examples of well-formed pronunciation lessons and activities as examples.
• During pronunciation instruction, point out how the lesson is structured according to good lesson-plan design.
• Provide examples of situations where pronunciation can facilitate or hinder communication.
• Recommend high-quality resources where students can learn more about pronunciation and see good examples of pronunciation instruction. My curated Padlet of pronunciation resources aimed at learners in the Swedish context is available at https://padlet.com/mara_haslam/ypza25zl9jqt. I would be happy to receive e-mail with suggestions for additions to this collection.
• Challenge common beliefs and educate teacher students around best principles of pronunciation instruction. For example, instead of teaching that American English and British English are the only ideal targets, we can teach students about the concepts of intelligibility and English as a Lingua Franca. Instead of the common strategy of talking faster when a student is unsure of pronunciation, we can teach them strategies for more successful communication, such as good use of thought groups and how to circumlocute difficult words. And instead of their common belief that pronunciation is best taught through error correction, we can teach them principles of good formative assessment, including whether and how to address learners’ errors.

I hope this article has provided some ideas about how pronunciation and principles of pronunciation teaching can be incorporated into any English teacher education. With time, good pronunciation instruction and good English teaching will hopefully “trickle down” to the next generation of future teachers, making the situation better for all future learners.

References

Levis, J., & Sonsaat, S. (2017). Pronunciation teaching in the early CLT era. The Routledge handbook of contemporary English pronunciation, 267-283.