U It is widely recognized that a crucial component in developing effective second language pronunciation is, in fact, the development of particular listening skills. In many textbooks ostensibly dedicated to improving ESL pronunciation, a substantial number of exercises are devoted to making sure that the student, as listener, can first recognize the types of sound distinctions that are phonemic in English. As Prator and Robinett (1985) claim in the introduction to their pronunciation manual, the first step in to pronounce in a second language is learning to hear and identify a sound or sound contrast when a native speaker produces it (p. xvi). To develop this perceptual ability, most pronunciation texts offer various types of phoneme discriminaton exercises. The assumption is that the more often ESL learners can accurately identify the English sound contrasts presented, the more sensitive they will become to the basic elements in the English sound system. It should prove particularly disturbing, then, to ESL pronunciation teachers if, after a period of instruction employing such materials, a major proportion of their learners actually get worse, in terms of test scores, on a phoneme discrimination task.
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Yule et al. (1987) studied this question.