Second Language Pronunciation

The parallel (or non-communicative) approach to integration means that pronunciation is planned as part of instruction but it is not connected in any obvious way to other language goals. For example, phonics-oriented instruction may show students how to predict sound from spelling patterns, but this is done within a parallel section of course instruction rather than incorporated into reading instruction.

The communicative approach not only takes into account the inclusion of pronunciation into instruction but also ensures that pronunciation features are implanted into communicative tasks. For example, in teaching rhythmic adjustments to connected speech, transcripts from listening activities would be used to demonstrate how vowel reduction, linking, and other aspects of connected speech work within the already planned activity.

We know that teaching pronunciation in any form almost invariably leads to improvement in accuracy (Lee et al., 2015; Thomson & Derwing, 2015), especially in the short term, but we have little knowledge of how different ways of teaching pronunciation result in different outcomes. This is especially true in documenting the effects of approaches that integrate pronunciation into the classroom, both for specific features (e.g., Levis & Muller Levis, 2018) and for more general approaches that prioritize pronunciation as part of global speaking and listening skills (Derwing et al., 1998; Zhang & Yuan, 2020). Effectively integrating pronunciation with other areas of language instruction may serve as a “value-added” factor in language instruction (Pennington & Rogerson-Revell, 2019); that is, it may serve to show learners that other L2 language skills improve more when integrated with improved pronunciation skills. This section will describe possible ways to research the integration of pronunciation so that we better understand how integrating pronunciation affects teacher confidence, student communicative success, and effective materials development. Such research may show that pronunciation integration leads to better comprehensibility and intelligibility, that it leads to equal or greater improvement than teaching pronunciation alone, and it may demonstrate the best ways to integrate pronunciation.

There are few studies on the effectiveness of integrating pronunciation with other aspects of language teaching. This means that this is a largely unexplored area with great importance for the overall effectiveness of classroom language teaching. Like all instructional studies, ensuring that instructional contexts are as similar as possible is a challenging task. The ideas in Table 2.2all have in common two (or more) classes in which the instructional focus differs in how pronunciation is addressed. Details of effective research practices are not addressed, but they can be found in Munro and Derwing (2020).

Table 2.2 Ideas for researching pronunciation integration.

In this section, we examine two ways of integrating pronunciation into classes focused primarily on other skills. We do this first through the use of vignettes, in which teachers create their own non-textbook focused plan and second, through examples of how to connect pronunciation skills to published textbook materials. These two approaches provide distinct challenges. In the vignettes, teachers have tremendous flexibility about what is included in a lesson, but when following the pedagogy provided by textbooks (which an instructor often has not chosen), pronunciation connections often must be made by teachers without assistance from the textbook or teacher’s guide. In our examples, we have developed two vignettes showing how pronunciation can be integrated into different types of ABE classes. In the first vignette, we look at a literacy-level class, where basic literacy skills and vocabulary lessons are taught with a workplace focus. Vignette 2 involves a pre-CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant) class with high intermediate and advanced English learners. In addition, we look at two examples of published materials (one for lower-level classes and one for higher level) to show where pronunciation can be relevant to other skills even when it is not included by the textbook authors.

In this workplace-focused literacy-level class, the learners are newly arrived refugees from Southeast Asia, with native speakers of Burmese, Karen, Karenni, and Nepali. Approximately half are literate in their native languages that use non-Roman alphabets, and the other half have limited or no literacy skills. All learners have limited speaking and listening skills in English.

To determine the most prominent pronunciation challenges for this group of learners, the teacher carried out a simple diagnostic to analyze the pronunciation of various features in English, and to prioritize them in order of importance. After completing the diagnostic, the teacher determines that many learners do not produce consonant sounds at the ends of words, and that many speak very softly with minimal articulation of word and sentence stress. Therefore, the teacher incorporates activities focusing on these areas into the lesson planning ( Table 2.3), using the predetermined lesson content: developing vocabulary to report a workplace injury.

Table 2.3 Lesson plan for final sounds, spelling-pronunciation correspondence and sentence stress in Vignette 1.

Opening the Lesson: The teacher introduces parts of the body using pictures, then leads the class through a Total Physical Response (TPR) activity; the teacher issues commands (e.g., Point to your leg. Point to your head .) and the learners listen and follow the instructions. The teacher then moves to activities that build both perception and production of final consonants in target vocabulary, with the repetition and the immediate feedback from the teacher and classmates helping learners commit accurate phonological representations of the words to their long-term memory. Additionally, the perception activities help learners develop their spelling ability for later writing activities; when asked to “sound it out,” they are more acutely aware that words are made up of individual sounds that can be pulled apart to discover the spelling of a word. Most activities in the lesson do not incorporate reading or writing, instead providing multiple auditory and kinesthetic opportunities to practice target vocabulary. This allows learners to focus on perception and production of the vocabulary without interference from written text.