Форум Дніпропетровської державної фінансової академії

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TEACHING PRONUNCIATION TO ESP SPEAKERS: IS THERE A PROBLEM OR THERE IS NONE?

Myronova T. Y., Candidat of Pedagogical Science,
The Head of Foreign Languages Department
Dnipropetrovs’k State Financial Academy

Teaching of pronunciation is actually an eternal problem for some and absence of such for the others. Everything depends on several attitudes:
1. How much responsible and demanding of high standards the language pedagogues are with regards their own language performance. The teacher who has invested great efforts into own practising and acquiring refined phonetic skills will never put up with the students’ sound and intonation inaccuracy and will be a model for the learners. He or she will achieve noticeable teaching results in little remarks and corrections in any work the learners are doing. The success will come even without intensive phonetic drills and study of rules.
2. What teachers understand as an objective of their efforts in a way of real-life activity that is possible for their students. When a teacher believes that his or her students are able to be dreaming and be working for their dream of international cooperating, then the students themselves can be daring enough to put high objectives and live with the idea that they are able to attain them in accurate and regular linguistic work. The teacher who gives up thinking of the students’ chances to communicate face-to-face with the native speakers, especially in professional performance, is visible in teaching. Then the classroom lacks perspectives. The unmotivated students go through the motions of learning ‘with clipped wings’ and will never ‘fly’. In the situation like that, language studies turn a dull and uninspiring chore and teaching resembles inane duty. The students will hardly find extra time for language work, and even doing this, will think of something else.
3. What teachers think about their communicative status in international cooperation. Naively believing that the huge world beyond the native country will be grateful to our compatriots for every word they pronounce in the foreign language, teachers of foreign languages make a great social and communicative mistake. Moreover, such wrong attitudes are likely to spread among the students whatever is misleading if not completely wrong. The world is only respectful of the highest professionalism; let it be the narrow specialization or/and linguistic and communicative skills. The foreign colleagues will never strain to listen and decipher the phonetics and prosody of inaccurate uttering in their language. They will be polite and patient for a while, but unlikely they will decide in favor of such impeded cooperation. They are liable to find someone else, who is communicatively ready, with whom to do the business.
4. How much the foreign language teachers are respectful of their native land. This means that, as the citizens of this country, they should believe in the compatriots’ capability of being on equal terms with the native speakers in their profession whatever becomes reality through good quality foreign language communication. It is going to be the credit to own country when the British or Americans, being very demanding of their partners’ good quality speech, find possible to do a business on equal terms. And to the contrary, what a shame it might appear if they decide that they will not be happy about straining to understand the staff and, therefore, endangering their business only because their foreign colleagues are difficult in making clear what they mean. So, they are likely to affably decline our county’s another opportunity. Especially readily they will do so if the people involved are leaving the young adult’s age. Vainly do some count upon the idea that if the foreigners are interested in cooperation, they will teach good English to them and will take care of themselves in this respect. Probably, for youngsters, it could turn true but briefly; to older people, the native teachers usually say the situation is incorrigible.
There is a current tendency in the English speaking community to be humane and show the tolerance of the imperfections in foreign language speech. This should not be misleading. Along with the tolerance of the kind, goes division into “our English” and “English for the rest of the world”. The last qualification does not mean cooperation on equal terms.
5. How knowledgeable the foreign language teacher is about the importance of pronunciation in the overall communicative performance. Actually, it is not only pronunciation of sounds that accounts for the speech quality that approaches that of the native speakers’. Those are also prosodic powers, including rhythm, rate, even whisper, breathlessness, huskiness, nasality, and extra lip-rounding etc. As it is, pronunciation is a vast area of language activity that is above and beyond the word level, even greater and richer than the sentence level. The true pronunciation starts working effectively only at the level of a paragraph, while smoothly flowing into intricate national and personal patterns of individual speech. So, endless exercises in out-dated separate rows of words containing the target sound lead to nothing but aversion to the language.
Considering the abovementioned, the further insights promise to be helpful to the teachers:
1. Be high-level professionals in the foreign language communication.
2. Be dreaming of the highest communicative success and share the attitude of the kind with the learners.
3. Be thinking of the social responsibility: when the former foreign language students learn that their candidacy is declined in business because of their underdeveloped communicative skills, they will barely be grateful to their foreign language teachers, at least for the fact that the language pedagogues have not ingrained the idea into their minds that the foreign world lives a highly competitive life-style.
4. Be patriotic and humanistic to own compatriots, believing in their intellectual potential.
5. Be looking for further professional linguistic knowledge, observation of real-life communication and practicing as a complete personality while communicating for specific purposes. Once the teachers get refined in their foreign language skills, the students will see whom they follow.