Powerful and Effective Pronunciation Instruction: How Can We Achieve It?

Pronunciation instruction is still underemphasized in many language programs as well as in teacher-training curricula despite reports of significant improvement from many studies. Three factors may account for this resistance and for the difficulty of making pronunciation instruction an integral part of language teaching: the time obstacle, the methodology obstacle, and the curricular obstacle. I will outline why these obstacles have emerged, and suggest specific solutions to work around them, with the goal of achieving powerful pronunciation practices in the classroom. The approach taken draws on psycholinguistic research about the mechanisms of phonological acquisition in second language (L2) learners (in both in-class and out-of-class learning contexts).