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The Importance of Pronunciation Teaching and Learning语音教学和学习的重要性
According to Dalton and Seidlhofer (1994), pronunciation can be generally defined as the production of important sound in two senses. On the one hand, sound is important results from it functions as the code of one particular language, and therefore people may differentiate between English and other languages and pronunciation can be regarded as the production of sounds of speech; on the other hand, sound is important since it is applied as the way to reach meaning in the context of use (ibid.). As Derwing and Munro (2005) points out, it is beneficial for people to have better pronunciation as it may be of great help to communication especially intelligibility. It is true that people who have good pronunciation is more easier understood when communicating than people who have worse performance on pronunciation. Besides, what we cannot deny that some pronunciation errors may result in jokes even misunderstanding. For example, if one pronounces “snack” as “snake”, then could you imagine how horrible it would be. What is more, teaching and learning pronunciation is significant because pronunciation can be linked with other areas of English skills such as listening, speaking and spelling of vocabulary, i.e. teaching and learning pronunciation may exert good influence on improving listening and speaking as well as spelling of vocabulary. “It is widely recognized that a crucial component in developing effective second language pronunciation is, in fact, the development of particular listening skills. In many textbooks ostensibly dedicated to improving ESL pronunciation, a substantial number of exercises are devoted to making sure that the student, as listener, can first recognize the types of sound distinctions that are phonemic in English” (Yule et al., 2012: 765). Furthermore, as Gilbert (2008) states, there is a connection between listening comprehension and pronunciation learning. She also insists that listening comprehension can be severely affected by different respects of pronunciation, and “pronunciation work should concentrate on the way English uses certain sound distinctions, rhythm and pitch to alert listeners to significant grammar and discourse features that are used to keep listeners on track with speakers. Practice with these aspects of pronunciation can help listening as well as intelligibility” (Gilbert, 2008: 109). According to Zhao and Campbell (1995), having good pronunciation may result in better communication, and more importantly, it is able to make people become more confident when communicating and thus speaking ability may be gradually improved. In terms of the relationship between pronunciation and vocabulary, a number of researchers and scholars present their views. According to Kelly (2000), people need to use 44 different English sounds when speaking English whereas there are only 26 English letters. That is to say, it could be said that “there is not a one-to-one correspondence between spelling and pronunciation in English” (Kelly, 2000: 122). It is true that people may mispronounce and misspell words result from the lack of the correspondence between English pronunciation system and English spelling system. As Kay (1930) states, errors in pronunciation may be influential to spelling. With the help of corpus, Li (2006) also demonstrates that more than half of spelling mistakes are related to inaccurate pronunciation. Generally speaking, students are more likely to make spelling mistakes due to unstressed vowels and silent letters as well as double letters (Mitton, 1996). (责任编辑：anne) |
