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37THE ROLE OF PRONUNCIATION WITHIN DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING
Fayazova D.S.
Fayazova Dilfuza Sa 'dullayevna - Teacher of the English Language, ENGLISH LANGUAGE DEPARTMENT, BUKHARA ENGINEERING-TECHNOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, BUKHARA, REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN
Abstract: in this article, pronunciation teaching is examined from a historical point of view. In more detail, the article concentrates on the role of pronunciation within different approaches to foreign language teaching, and it tracks important changes in methods of pronunciation training and the most salient shifts in general principles, overall goals, and foci of pronunciation teaching.
Keywords: role of pronunciation, changes in methods of pronunciation training, changes in goals of pronunciation training, historical perspective.
Teaching English pronunciation is an area of language teaching that many English teachers avoid. While there are many textbooks and instruction manuals available, as well as books on the theories and methodologies of language teaching there is comparatively little on learning pronunciation. Why? Is it because we don't need to teach pronunciation or because it cannot be taught.
Certainly, we need to teach pronunciation. There is a big difference between a ship and a sheep and a pear and a bear! When teaching any language as a foreign or second language, our first goal for our students is basic communication, and that can't happen if no one can understand what they are saying.
When teachers decide to focus on pronunciation practice many of them make the mistake of trying to teach pronunciation along with introducing vocabulary. This can work with students who have a "good ear," or who perhaps speak a related language. As Brown [1] remarks, the component of pronunciation was one of the pillars of these methods, and furthermore, the dominant goal of the discussed approaches was the "nativeness principle".
Most textbooks will have you drill pronunciation with repetition of the vocabulary. Some of the better ones will have you work on it with spelling, which is an important skill, especially in English with its many irregularities and exceptions. Very few will start you and your students where you need to start, however, and that is at the level of the phoneme. Along with the shift in the main topics of pronunciation instruction, also the main goal of pronunciation teaching was different from the past objective of a native-like accent. In the 1980s and later, there was a general consensus among language teachers that the superior goal of pronunciation training should not be the eradication of a learner's foreign accent in order of attaining perfectly accurate pronunciation, but rather the ultimate goal should be pronunciation that does not act as a detractor of one's communicative ability [2]).
Most sounds are articulated inside your mouth and students have no idea what you are doing in order to produce that particular noise. If you have ever tried to teach a Japanese student how to say an American /r/, then you have experienced the frustration of trying to get a student to produce tongue movements they can't see. There are books out there with diagrams, and with a little practice you can probably produce sketches of them yourself. If you can't, get hold of a good reference book so that you can flip to the relevant pages. Your students will thank you for this insight into the mouth, especially since there is no danger of the embarrassment of bad breath with a drawing.
This is to indicate that it is intended as a guide for lingua franca interactions, not interactions between a native and non-native speaker of English. All these things are said to be important for a native speaker listener either because they aid intelligibility or because they are thought to make an accent more appropriate. Students should be given
choice. That is, when students are learning English so that they can use it in international contexts with other non-native speakers from different first languages, they should be given the choice of acquiring a pronunciation that is more relevant to EIL intelligibility than traditional pronunciation syllabuses offer. Up to now, the goal of pronunciation teaching has been to enable students to acquire an accent that is as close as possible to that of a native speaker. But for EIL communication, this is not the most intelligible accent and some of the non-core items may even make them less intelligible to another non-native speaker. The non-core items are not only unimportant for intelligibility but also socially more appropriate. After all, native speakers have different accents depending on the region where they were born and live [2].
In the conclusion students should be given plenty of exposure in their pronunciation classrooms to other non-native accents of English so that they can understand them easily even if a speaker has not yet managed to acquire the core features. For EIL, this is much more important than having classroom exposure to native speaker accents.
References
1. Brown H. Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. 3rd ed. White Plains: Pearson Longman, 2007. 569 p.
2. Busa M.G., 2007. New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation. In: BALDRY A. From Didactas to Ecolingua: An Ongoing Research Project on Translation and Corpus Linguistics. Trieste: EUT, 2008. 238 p.
