Revista desde el Sur

As Adam Brown points out, “[m]ost modern writers are
agreed that suprasegmental features are, if anything,
more important than segmental in terms of intelligibility(…)”.
(3) That is to say that intonation, rhythm, word
and sentence stress should be paid at least as much attention
as individual sounds.
Once all the above matters have been considered, teachers
should be able to produce a pronunciation syllabus
(or agenda), a rough outline which would remind them as
to where to go through the course, very much as we have
grammatical or functional/notional syllabi for other levels
of language. A pronunciation syllabus will help systematize
our pronunciation teaching.
4. When should I teach pronunciation?
Ideally, pronunciation should be present, albeit covertly,
in every single lesson. It should be an integral part of our
lessons, very much as all other levels of language should.
We do pronunciation teaching when we decide on correcting
certain mistakes and consistently do so throughout
our lessons. The specific point in time when we should
correct a certain pronunciation mistake is very difficult
to generalise. It will largely depend on the kind of oral
activity in question. Yet, it is always convenient to work
on pronunciation only after we have worked on meaning.
If the mistake were found during a fluency activity, the
teacher may wish to take note of the mistake and wait
to work on it at a more appropriate point in time. If the
activity were one of accuracy, then the mistake should
probably have to be corrected on the spot, or when giving
immediate feedback.
5. How often should I work explicitly on pronunciation?
There is no single answer for this question.
Explicit pronunciation teaching should come in when new
linguistic aspects are introduced which present some pronunciation
challenge or whenever remedial work is necessary.
Adam Brown reminds us that “[i]t is not necessary
that explicit pronunciation teaching should appear in
(4)
every ELT lesson”. Yet, if we were to work on aspects
of pronunciation such as word stress, after presenting and
practicing the aspect, we should return to it every now
and then so as to guarantee that it be will be minimally
profitable for students. It would be of very little use to
work on it once and move on. As with all other aspects
of language teaching, the assumption that teaching and
learning is a one-to-one relation is fallacious.
6. What should I do with textbook exercises?
The saying “the book is a good servant but a bad master”
has never been more appropriate. We often find that not
every activity the textbook suggests is worth doing with
our class and perhaps, more importantly, we discover that
there are needs the textbook does not seem to fulfil. Our
first task is deciding which of the pronunciation activities
in the textbook are worth doing and which are not.
A second task would be deciding what else we can use
from the textbook in order to exploit it fully for our pronunciation
teaching. By way of example, recordings from
the book can be further used for raising awareness of a
certain aspect of pronunciation; dialogues can be used to
(3) Brown, A. (1992), p. 11
(4) Brown, A. (1992), p. 13
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