Description
As recently as 2018, Darcy bemoaned the fact that, “despite being widely recognized as important, pronunciation does not receive equal attention in the language curriculum” (13). There are many complex reasons for this omission, but the fact remains that pronunciation is an important component of speech production, which needs to be addressed in the second language classroom. Since the turn of the century, pronunciation research has flourished and is beginning to paint a nuanced picture of L2 pronunciation acquisition and the influences on it, but these findings do not seem to have filtered through to course book writers, curriculum designers and the teachers themselves. Celce-Murcia et al. (2018) note that, “the emphasis in pronunciation instruction has been largely on getting the sounds right at the word level” (10), despite limited evidence that such an approach influences spontaneous speech production. Instead, researchers have begun to look at a more top-down approach which would “start at the level of broad social context, suprasegmentals, and related behaviours, then systematically progress ‘downwards’ to the segmental level” (Pennington, 2019, 381). This talk will look at what this top-down approach might look like in the classroom and suggest activities which could help students work on accent modification.| Period | 15 Nov 2024 → 16 Nov 2024 |
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| Event title | 9th International Conference on Teaching English as a Foreign Language : Innovation in English language education: Adapting pedagogies to meet modern challenges |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Lisbon, PortugalShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |