Ten Tips for teaching pronunciation to high school students

Abstract

[eng] Pronunciation has been traditionally neglected in EFL classes to the extent that it has been referred to “as the poor relation of the English language teaching world” (Brown, 1991), “the orphan” (Gilbert, 2010) or “the Cinderella” (Underhill, 2013) in language lessons. Reasons for this neglect include the fact that teaching pronunciation is regarded as time-consuming (Szypra, 2015); and, some non-native EFL teachers either lack training in teaching pronunciation and thus avoid teaching it (Szpyra, 2015); or, as non-natives, they do not consider themselves good pronunciation models (Foote, Holtby and Derwing, 2011; Szpyra, 2015). While English pronunciation is a difficult language area to teach (mainly due to the irregular correspondences between English spelling and pronunciation), there are some points teachers can take into consideration to make teaching pronunciation easier and more effective both in the short and the long run.