Breaking the ice with phonetics and phonology

Abstract

Teaching pronunciation in language courses has traditionally followed two approaches: the intuitive-imitative approach and the analytic-linguistic approach. The former consists in reproducing the target language on the basis of a good model without any explicit instruction. The latter proposes reflection on pronunciation features through such tools as graphic representations like the phonetic alphabet, articulatory descriptions and contrastive information. It is meant to complement the former as analysis follows imitation. The role of pronunciation teaching has varied through time in the light of the development of different methods following either of these approaches. While the grammar-translation, reading-based and cognitive methods tended to deemphasize or even ignore the importance of pronunciation, the direct method, audiolingual method and naturalistic approaches paid more attention to pronunciation features. The communicative approach has brought renewed interest in pronunciation as an important tool for communication. In the light of this new perspective, work on pronunciation has started to combine different techniques which include not only imitation but also analysis to develop awareness (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin 2010). In an attempt to combine these two approaches, in this chapter we focus on the teaching of the first module of phonetics and phonology at the ELTE programme at UNCO, Argentina.