Questões de Concurso Público SEDUC-AL 2021 para Professor - Inglês

    The role of pronunciation in non-native language teaching has been in a state of constant change. In the earlier approaches, foreign language pronunciation was either the result of exposure to the target language or of approaches which used complex sets of drills and repetitions. As suggested, to a large extent, the importance of pronunciation has always been determined by ideology and intuition rather than by research. Teachers have intuitively decided which features have the greatest effect on clarity and which are learnable in a classroom setting. Saito claims that while the morphological and syntactical levels of languages are taught in contextualized meaningful exercises, pronunciation practice is decontextualized due to the use of drills and repetition.

    Pronunciation is one of the aspects of language both native and non-native teachers of English are not keen on teaching, and a lack of adequate teacher training results in an intuitive use of available materials and techniques. Setting pedagogical goals must be based on knowledge of pronunciation issues. Unqualified teachers may have misconceptions about phonological phenomena, cannot evaluate or use teaching materials accurately, and do not set realistic goals when teaching pronunciation. Furthermore, even teaching materials do not reflect the conclusions of current research, and they can be perceived as boring; however, Baker argues that teachers who complete a pronunciation course have, and apply, a wider range of pronunciation activities in their classrooms.

    Whatever training is given there should always be a permanent concern about the naturalness and spontaneity of everyday speech rather than an artificial sound production for the sake of preserving a “correct” pronunciation.

    This is, in fact, a crucial issue, since if too much care is demanded from the student, this may turn out to be an undesirable blockage to another more important factor, namely, fluency. Perhaps, and even worse, if over-careful pronunciation habits are developed, this will certainly cause difficulties for the oral comprehension, as the students will expect to hear sounds, words and utterances the way they personally produce them.