IATEFL+Conference+Reflection+by+Esra+CATE


 * REFLECTION ON “PRONUNCIATION MATTERS” **

The conference session I chose to listen on IATEFL website was “Pronunciation Matters” by Robin Walker, because I think the importance of pronunciation on language teaching is underestimated in Turkey. Most Turkish teachers do not pay attention to the pronunciation and give importance to vocabulary and grammar accuracy instead. Here, in this reflection I will try to explain the impacts of pronunciation on different aspects of language in the light of the points that the presenter touch upon during the conference.

Pronunciation is a very crucial matter not only in the field of English Language Teaching but also in the field of Foreign Language Teaching. In order to establish a healthy communication with a foreigner or a native speaker of a language, you have to be intelligible. Without intelligibility we cannot talk about communication there, because that means your message do not reach the receiver, thereby you are not understood. What come out of the mouth of the speaker should meet the expectations of the listener, and this can only be provided with the correct pronunciation of the words.

I agree with the idea that lack of pronunciation of some words may cause more serious problems than we think. Firstly, the student who is not competent in pronunciation of a foreign language will try to avoid producing some structures and/or pronouncing certain words that are hard to pronounce, and this will all lead a decrease in learner’s ability to listen and understand. Not knowing the pronunciation of the words would end up with not being able to recognize them when it is heard. For example, when a student sees ‘Asia’ in a written text, s/he will certainly recognize it, but when the same word is heard and if the student is not able to recognize it, then this means the problem is not the lack of vocabulary but pronunciation. Pronunciation would also cause some problems at sentence level, for instance a student who cannot differentiate “can” and “can’t” when they are heard; it totally changes the meaning of the sentence. Third impact of the pronunciation is on listening. It is hard for students to listen to some information or a message given by somebody, to understand all of it and then code it on their memory in order to fill the information gap. When their pronunciation is not at a very competent level, they will be unable to deal with the quantity of information coming into the working memory which will lead the overloading of meaningless signals and finally they would not know what to do with all these signals and then they would simply block it or blankly look at the person who is speaking.

Another important impact of pronunciation is on writing which most students suffers from while taking notes that are substantial for some purposes like passing the course, and so forth. When students hear a word of which they do not know the pronunciation, they simply tend to invent spellings to fit the signal those coming to them. Mostly what they invent would be inevitably on their L1, for example if somebody said ‘Stuttgart’ to me for the first time in Germain, I would spell it like ‘Ştutgard’ which has the marks of my L1 which is Turkish.

The most surprising effect of pronunciation is on reading, when I first heard this I thought the presenter was exaggerating the issue. I could not believe that the pronunciation affects students’ reading skills. Especially when Robin Walker said ‘If you wish to improve your students’ L2 reading skills, you have to work on their pronunciation and make their pronunciation better’ I was stunned. Sound that you hear goes in the working memory and until very high levels of competence of L2 the sound is circulated in the phonological route, and if you are unable to circulate the sound there, no long term memory and thus no memory of what you read occurs which leads you to be poor readers. Therefore, teaching phonology will help learners to read better! Of course, this does not mean that L2 speaker has to have a native or native-like pronunciation of L2 phonemes. Native speaker accuracy is not a must for readers.

All in all, I hope I could change most teachers’ or teacher-to-be students’ mind about the significance of pronunciation and it would help them to educate their learners’ keeping in mind that pronunciation matters.

REFERENCE
Walker, R.(2011). //Pronunciation Matters. // The 45th Annual International IATEFL Conference & Exhibition. Retrieved from: []

- Esra CATE