Noises and Colors: Two Untraditional Methods of Teaching ESL/ EFL Pronunciation

Abstract

This article is based on a professional development session or presentation that the author gave in a regional TESOL affiliate conference, and it discusses the importance of teaching, why ESL/ EFL teachers should teach pronunciation, the reasons they generally give for avoiding it and how we can integrate it into our curriculum. The author sheds light on SLA, Second Language Acquisition, research especially studies that are related to connectionism or the noticeability hypothesis and their connection to teaching and practicing pronunciation in the ESL/EFL classroom. The article focuses on not only teaching segmental aspects of English pronunciation such as vowel phonemes but underscores suprasegmental features such as thought groups/chunking and word/phrase stress because they shape rhythm in English, which is key to intelligibility. The author also suggests using two effective and tested techniques in teaching pronunciation to a variety of ESL/EFL learners and provides samples of classroom activities that could be easily implemented in teaching pronunciation together with vocabulary. The article concludes with reviewing some studies conducted quite recently about one of these two suggested approaches to see how effective this approach is.