Pronunciation Importance In Language Teaching

features, pronunciation is crucial in affecting the conveying of the message in a desired or undesired way. However, as Kelly (1969) mentioned in his extensive study about the history of language teaching, pronunciation was the Cinderella area which had been surpassed by other skills and elements of the language and ignored in foreign language teaching context until the end of the nineteenth century. It started to attract attention with the advent of reform movement in language teaching in the 1890s. The current situation of teaching pronunciation receives support from the communicative approach which plays a significant role in language teaching today. Since this approach puts communication at the center of language learning/teaching processes

It was the center of the classroom instruction, since the main purpose of language learning and teaching moved towards listening and speaking skills (Lightbown & Spada, 2006). Accuracy was at the center of language learning- teaching practices (Celce-Murcia et al., 1996; Morley, 1991). As a result of this, students spent most of their time in laboratories, listening to sounds in order to be able to differentiate minimal pairs (Larsen-Freeman, 1986). In the 1960s, teaching pronunciation started to decline, since grammar and vocabulary were the focus of attention. Therefore, pronunciation lost its value in the view of many educators and it was disregarded in many programs (Seidlhofer, 2001). According to Morley (1991), the main reason for disregarding pronunciation instruction in language teaching programs was that educators were dissatisfied with the teaching of pronunciation principles and practices of the time, therefore, they excluded pronunciation from their teaching. The role that pronunciation plays in language teaching-learning settings is non-negligible even if the necessity and importance to teach it has been debated and changed a lot in accordance with the on-again, off-again trends in the field. Whether or not there is a professional intention, learning a language usually includes the aim of being able to communicate and having good pronunciation is an effective factor for good

Some researchers emphasize the “bottom-up” method to teach pronunciation, which focuses on individual sounds or words (segmental features). Most proponents claim that the “top-down” method, which focuses on the stress, rhythm and intonation of sentences (suprasegmental-prosodic features) as a whole is more effective (Pennington & Richards, 1986; Pennington, 1989). In the “bottom up” method, students start learning fundamental pronunciation features and keep learning next features of pronunciation that require more knowledge of the language. Whereas, in the “top- down” method, general pronunciation features, which require more language knowledge and use of macro-skills, such as critical thinking and analyzing, are presented and students are expected to deduce language pronunciation rules and improve their pronunciation skills. The reason why teaching suprasegmental features of pronunciation is favored is not only its being more comprehensive than segmental features, in terms of the components it involves, but also its being more contributive to the main purpose of teaching pronunciation: intelligibility (Celce-Murcia et al.,1996; McNermey & Mendelsohn, 1992; Gilbert,