On The Principles And Strategies Of Teaching English Pronunciation

For many years, we have reached a consensus that pronunciation teaching is an essential part of language courses. With the development and popularization of the communicative approach, people begin to highlight the importance of pronunciation in language learning. For the complexity of the influential factors of pronunciation teaching, teachers have ignored it for a long time. They want to find an effective way to improve the communicative competence of learners in the pronunciation classes.This paper, while aiming at reappraising pronunciation teaching contribution to English language teaching for second language learners, attempts to introduce a new way of English pronunciation teaching ?the learner-centered pronunciation teaching approach.The paper falls into six parts. In the preface the author emphasizes the importance of pronunciation teaching in language learning, and presents some misunderstandings in pronunciation teaching. In Chapter 1, it gives a historical review of the pronunciation teaching for second language learners and points out that the ultimate goal of pronunciation teaching is to develop the communicative competence of language learners. In Chapter 2, after making an analysis of a survey among students and interview among teachers, the author finds out the problem of current English pronunciation teaching in China is not whether we should teach it or not, but how to teach it more effectively in the classroom so as to develop the communicative competence of learners. Thus in Chapter 3, it presents the basic principles of the pronunciation teaching and introduces concepts, advantages and steps of the learner-centered pronunciation teaching method. In chapter 4, the present writer tries to prove that the new method is better than the traditional one by conducting an experiment. By comparing the scores and performance of students ofthe controlled group with those of the uncontrolled group in an oral test, we may tentatively arrive at a conclusion that the learner-centered pronunciation teaching is better than the traditional one and is really an effective way to develop learners' communicative competence. However, there was never and will never be a perfect method in language teaching. Therefore, the author believes that the new method might still need more improvement.