Second Language Pronunciation Essay

Throughout the late 1960s and the 1970s, scholars raised several questions with regard to the pronunciation’s role in the curriculum of English as a second or foreign language. According to Morley (1991), pronunciation programs until the late 1960s and the early 1970s were “viewed as meaningless non-communicative drill-and-exercise gambits” (p. 45). It is believed that the factors affecting second language pronunciation are primarily variables that cannot be affected by formal rules and focused practice (Krashen, 1982). Likewise, other scholars such as Purcell and Suter (1980) argued that the factors (e.g., motivation, aptitude for oral mimicry, native language, and the interaction with native speakers), which chiefly influence the second language phonology’s acquisition “seem to be

Speech is divided into two parts, segmentals and suprasegmentals, both of which people with hearing impairment have difficulty in producing and perceiving (Crystal, 1991; Gold, 1980; Northern & Downs, 2002). Segmental features are the production of phonemes and are considered as the features of smallest units in speech (Crystal, 1991), while Suprasegmentals are the features of intonation and vocal expression in speech, such as stress, duration, frequency, rate and nasality in speech (Crystal, 1991; Gold, 1980).

The features of English pronunciation are shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Various Features of English Pronunciation (Gilakjani, 2012, p.120). Both segmental and suprasegmental features are discussed in great detail in the following sections.

2.2.1.1. Segmental