Exploring English Pronunciation Pedagogy In EFL Classrooms

This thesis delves into the literature on pronunciation pedagogy, pinpoints the phonological challenges for practitioners at both segmental and suprasegmetnal levels, examines the effect students' cultural frames of reference inherent in Chinese EFL classrooms have on their English pronunciation learning and the implications for pronunciation instruction, and proposes a framework for pronunciation pedagogy in Chinese EFL classrooms on a learnable and teachable scale. This study is of great significance to classroom teachers interested in examining their teaching and developing more effective ways of maximizing their students' communication competence.Since there is no single fixed and fast rule existing for teaching pronunciation, an eclectic approach drawing upon a variety of research findings in foreign language phonology will most likely result in improved pronunciation. The initial chapter is thus reviewing literature on the phonological instruction since the time pronunciation was accepted as a linguistic property contributing to language acquisition around in the mid-20^th century and examining the pedagogical implications of each school of thought and theory for teaching pronunciation.In view of the prevailing misconception that deviant phonological performance can be utterly counterbalanced by the semantic content of utterances and the immediate context and that pronunciation is of secondary or minor importance in developing learners' communicative competence, an in-depth analysis is made in the second chapter of the communicative power of intelligible pronunciation at suprasegmetnal level from a pragmatic point of view, particularly the most striking prosodic feature, intonation, which is often given token significance in college English curriculum, from a relevance-theoretic perspective. The focus is laid on the constraints that three systemic variables of English intonation, tonicity, tonality and tone, produce on the inferential process of utterance comprehension and the delivery of intended meanings. In addition, given that segments function as the building blocks for further suprasegmental learning and that the pitfall of the traditional mechanical drilling is apparent in the recurrence and persistence of deviant segmental forms in learners phonological performance for want of such models as imitated in the classroom, which often brings about communicative disturbance, the integration and instruction of segments is addressed in light of contrastive study and acoustic analysis. The pedagogical implications can be derived from their compelling explanatory power for deviant sound production so that the instructor would not feel strictly limited in what to do to help learners improve beyond their present level of pronunciation proficiency.Furthermore, it is pointed out that acquaintance with learners' cultural frames of reference can help foreign language teachers adjust and extend patterns of communication and create the optimal classroom conditions for acquisition of English sound system. The third chapter thus concentrates on discussing diverse motivational, cognitive, and communicative styles; exploring their respective common patterns that are grounded in the Chinese cultural, social and educational context; and probing into the implications these three important components have for English pronunciation teachers to work out ways to cultivate autonomous learners with highly acceptable phonological competence for better communication. Following that sample English pronunciation lesson plans are presented in the fourth chapter to demonstrate an eclectic and communicatively effective approach to both segmental and suprasegmetnal features, which accounts for cognitive, affective and psycho-motor aspects of pronunciation learning in Chinese EFL classrooms as well as combines the merits already identified in the diverse pronunciation pedagogy.