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Becoming a pronunciation teacher - What does it take?

Publication at Faculty of Education |
2023

Abstract

Firstly, the talk will introduce the goals and motivation behind creating the freely available e-book Becoming a pronunciation teacher written by the authors of the talk. The publication was created in 2020 as part of the university project aimed at improving the quality of education for future English teachers.

Since then it has been used in the teacher training programme at the Charles University, Faculty of Education in Prague. Apart from describing the main milestones in the history of pronunciation teaching and exploring the basic factors affecting second language pronunciation learning, the e-book offers a general perspective on selecting and structuring the teaching content.

Most importantly, a number of video clips from real English classrooms with children and young adults, in which word stress is taught, are provided. Secondly, the talk will focus on the key moments in thinking about and deciding what, how, why, to what extent and in what order to teach, which will be demonstrated both theoretically and practically on selected pronunciation topics.

Lastly, it will be argued that a pronunciation teachers' expertise draws equally on their knowledge of the content (English phonetics and phonology), pedagogy and ELT methodology, and a number of other factors, such as age, language level, classroom atmosphere etc. that the teacher must be constantly aware of and flexible about while teaching pronunciation.