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As it can be seen that English pronunciation does have close connection with vocabulary and speaking as well as listening. As a result, pronunciation teaching should not be ignored, and it is necessary for English learners to pay attention to pronunciation part for the sake of achieving better results on other parts of English learning.
Goals of pronunciation teaching and learning发音教学和学习目标
Loads of researchers and scholars tend to focus on the ultimate goals of pronunciation teaching and learning, and what type of pronunciation model should be applied in ESL English class have been debated. In the past few years, some practitioners would like to set “Queen’s English” as their teaching goals no matter how well hey themselves perform on English pronunciation (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010).
On the contrary, Cook (1999) insists that establishing rather standard native-like pronunciation as the goal is so unrealistic that the majority of learners cannot achieve it. Kenworthy (1987) also claims that most people consider native-like pronunciation as the final goal few years ago whereas an increasing number of people have realized that the final goal is not appropriate in recent years. As a matter of fact, it cannot be said that regarding native-like pronunciation as learning goal is absolutely unacceptable. As Kenworthy (1987) points out, the teacher should not blow students’ self-confidence for setting lofty goals when learning pronunciation, even though there is no need to courage them to do this. What is more, Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) report that the minority of people who have regional accent would be looked down upon in some areas, and the discrimination may make those particular people feel upset. Accent have close connection with personal identity, and identity is also closely related to pronunciation (Stevick, 1978). Stevick (1978) even think that the teacher who neglect the relationship between identity and pronunciation may be more likely to waste time and energy to attain unrealistic goals.
Overall, there are two things need to be considered when establishing pronunciation learning goals. One is to think about the influence that inaccurate pronunciation may have on listeners and the other is to deliberate how much of mispronunciation the listener could tolerate.
With the consideration of the significance of intelligibility of pronunciation, it is worth talking about intelligibility separately here. Many researchers have discussed the definition and importance of intelligibility in the last decades. Bamgbose (1998) demonstrates that knowing what is intelligible and what is not seems to be critical for non-native speakers, particularly when they struggle to make themselves understood in front of the native speaker. It is true that different people may give different definition of the term intelligibility. Brown (1992: 3) indicates that “intelligibility means the success with which a speaker conveys his message to the listener”. Intelligibility is defined as “a complex of factors comprising recognizing an expression, knowing its meaning, and knowing what that meaning signifies in the sociocultural context’ (Bamgbose, 1998: 11). Intelligibility is also described as the same to understandability and defined as “being understood by a listener at a given time and a given situation” (Kenworthy, 1987: 13). It can be concluded that intelligibility is related to two words: ‘meaning’ and ‘context’. Moreover, Kenworthy (1987) provides two methods, which are actually more like two rules, to distinguish whether the speaker is intelligible, and rule number one is related to how many words said by the speaker that the listener can understand correctly may reflect how much the speaker is intelligible and rule number two refers to how much easier the listener can hear the key words in speech may illustrates the speaker is intelligible. Meanwhile, there is another relevant point worth mentioning here. As long as what information the listener receive matches with what the speaker have expressed then the speech can be seen as intelligible, even if the speaker pronounce a word as an alternative one (ibid.). Besides, Dalton and Seidlhofer (1994) point out that the speaker’s purpose and motivation may be influential to intelligibility. (责任编辑：anne) |
