ERIC Number: ED041259
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1969
Pages: 6
Abstractor: N/A
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Linguistics and the Teaching of Pronunciation.
Anderson, Tommy R.
A foreign language teacher has always been influenced by his conception of what language is; e.g., if he thinks language is mostly words, he concentrates on teaching words and measures success by the size of his pupils' vocabulary. The study of pronunciation gave rise to several developments within linguistics, which has up to the present time kept sounds, words, sentences, and meaning relatively separate for purposes of analysis. This has led to a kind of language teaching that is fragmented, centering attention on the word as a crucial unifying link in the development of linguistic skills. We are now, however, in for a period of linguistic theory in which we will have to concentrate on how words are selected and recognized. This should lead to a renaissance in the teaching of vocabulary. The pronunciation teacher should ask, "What does the student have to know about pronunciation in order to recognize any word that he might ever hear?" He has to be able to hear all of the necessary distinctive features of the language and know how words are made in terms of their pronunciation structure. The teacher should teach distinctive features rather than minimal pairs. The student recognizes a word by matching it up with what he hears. If he has been taught the sound system at the very beginning of his language learning, he will avoid misclassifying new words. (AMM)
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