Teaching of Pronunciation in the ESL Classroom: Universals & Language Specific Properties

This note considers two areas that may help teachers teach English pronunciation, namely the role of native language phonology and linguistic universals. The discussion is limited to sounds of English leaving suprasegmental issues aside and concentrates on French learners. Native language phonology constitutes a grid for the speech loop: L2 learners see the world of English through French glasses and they perceive/produce contrasts filtered by their L1 systemic properties. The second contribution of this note concerns the use of linguistic universals in the ESL classroom. Linguistic universals are features common to all languages; they are less marked, learned first and lost last in pathological speech loss. Sound systems and syllable structure all obey a universal markedness scale. Deeper understanding of these scales may help the design of L2 pronunciation teaching programmes.