Introduction chapter I. Theories and strategies about motivating teaching pronunciation

1.2. THE NECESSITY OF TEACHING ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION ON THE INTERNATIONAL GROUND
As the significance of the English language grows and its status of a global language is strengthened every day, a lot of people start realizing that the only knowledge of English grammar and vocabularies is becoming not to be sufficient. In today’s increasingly international world, it is not only necessary to understand what other English speakers say but it is also essential to make your own speech intelligible for the others. But even though the global character of English language makes many English learners and teachers realize the necessity of improving the pronunciation skills, many English students still cope with mispronouncing sounds, misplacing stress in sentences and misusing intonation patterns. O’Connor explains this problem as a matter of habits that our native tongue strongly incorporated into our language patterns. He adds that the ability to imitate the language perfectly weakens with the age as children of ten years or less are able to gain excellent knowledge of any language they are exposed to but children who are
older than ten are more likely to struggle with a difficulty in mastering the pronunciation. Tennant goes even further and explains that students whose first language belongs to the group of syllable-timed languages – e.g. Czech, Italian, Hungarian, where equal stress is placed to all syllables – find it difficult to adopt the English stress-time patterns. That is why so many adults grapple with pronouncing English sounds properly and fail to eliminate their native pronunciation habits.
The question is how to overcome these native language predispositions that prevent English learners from acquiring the English sounds properly. As Hewings says, the point is to expose English learners to as many pronunciation activities as possible in order to make them realize what their English pronunciation is like in comparison with the pronunciation of native English speakers. Following O’Connor and Fletcher, strengthening English speech habits requires a diligent practice. The assimilation of sounds that do not exist in speaker’s native language is a long term process. O’Connor and Fletcher put it in this way: The performance of a new contrast, once it can be heard, involves a new orientation of the motor control centre in the brain to produce unfamiliar muscular movements. The first stage must be to concentrate on minimally different pairs of words exhibiting the contrast which the student can produce, and which an English speaker can recognize, in adequate. The sounds may not be exactly what a native speaker would produce, but fine tuning of the actual sounds can be done gradually. It is not enough for the students to produce the contrast satisfactorily once or twice or three times. The problem is that in English courses there is usually little or no time allocated to teaching pronunciation and the majority of lesson planning is devoted to vocabulary and grammar progress. As Kelly claims, when planning a timetable
of English lessons, teachers naturally neglect to include any pronunciation issues and they put the most emphasis on organisation of grammatical structures and lexical syllabus. In fact, however, the responsibility of the educational system for English spoken skill development is as much significant as its responsibility for focusing on the written form of the language. Pronunciation, in comparison with the grammar rules, cannot be simply inculcated in a student’s mind. On contrary, it rather needs to be assimilated. Learners need to perceive the new sounds as babies who hear the language for the first time.