Survey of the Teaching of Pronunciation in Adult ESL Programs in Canada, 2010

By Jennifer A. Foote, Amy K. Holtby, Tracey M. Derwing. 2012

298 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This follow-up study reexamines the state of the teaching of pronunciation in ESL classes across Canada. The purpose of the survey was twofold: to gain a snapshot of current practices and to compare this with the picture of 10 years ago. We based the current work on Breitkreutz, Derwing, and Rossiter’s (2001) survey asking teachers about resources, approaches, and beliefs about teaching pronunciation. We also asked for background information about the instructors’ formal education and teaching experience. For the most part, instruction in pronunciation in Canada has not changed substantially in the last decade. More training opportunities are available, although these are still not enough according to many of our respondents. The number of pronunciation courses offered in English-as-asecond-language (ESL) programs has also increased. Teachers’ beliefs about pronunciation instruction remained largely the same, with a similar focus on suprasegmentals and segmentals. However, we did find a slight difference in how teachers approached these two aspects of pronunciation. Ten years ago, teachers reported emphasizing both aspects in class, whereas today there seemed to be a slightly greater focus on segmentals. Finally, we offer several recommendations for TESL programs, ESL programs, and ESL instructors.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b9a3902cd60c3a3c65b3504025d0ae76d6f4af2

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Language and Linguistics

Citations in the corpus

Does a Speaking Task Affect Second Language Comprehensibility (2015, background): “For instance, they support what many language teachers already know from experience, namely, that teaching pronunciation targets beyond individual sounds, such as syllable structure, word stress, and fluency phenomena, is worth targeting in instruction (Foote et al., 2011).”
Disentangling accent from comprehensibility (2012, unknown): “This is consistent with a typical instructional emphasis on segmentals in L2 classrooms and teachers’ general lack of knowledge about or confidence in teaching prosody (Derwing, 2003; Foote et al., 2011).”
The Effectiveness of L2 Pronunciation Instruction: A Narrative Review (2015, background): “If strong evidence of improved intelligibility and comprehensibility is found in language classrooms as a result of pronunciation instruction, more language instructors may be willing to teach pronunciation in systematic and principled ways (Foote et al. 2011).”
Beliefs and practices of Brazilian EFL teachers regarding pronunciation (2016, methodology): “The questionnaire was a modified version of the instruments developed by Burgess and Spencer (2000) and Foote et al. (2011).”