Saudi English Teachers’ Perception of their Own Pronunciation and Use of Teaching Practices of Pronunciation Skills

This descriptive quantitative analytical study sought to investigate English pronunciation skills of English language teachers themselves, who often neglect to teach this skill owing to lack of availability or awareness about pronunciation teaching practices. This study filled the gap of identifying the right teaching pronunciation practices as well as examining teachers' own pronunciation skills. This study investigated pronunciation practices of 67 EFL school teachers at Az Zulfi, a small city in the Riyadh region of Saudi Arabia. This study investigated how they taught pronunciation, and their priorities regarding pronunciation; what factors affected their teaching of pronunciation; how they perceived pronunciation, and whether they felt confident and skilled enough to teach and develop it. To collect data, we used an online Google form questionnaire, which was subjected to SPSS analysis. The study uncovered the following results: a) the majority of the EFL teachers in the sample considered pronunciation an essential skill in learning English, b) the teachers stated that communicative practice is the best way to teach pronunciation, c) the teachers considered both segments and supra segments in their teaching, d) audio/visual labs may enhance the teaching of pronunciation, and e) and the majority the teachers were certain that they needed to complete more training courses. The study suggests that future researches should consider larger number of teachers. Besides it would better to use more than one research tool for data collection.