1002283

editorial2021
REL0010.1177/00336882211002283RELC JournalEditorial

Editorial

RELC Journal

Teaching Pronunciation:
2021, Vol. 52(1) 3­–21
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/00336882211002283
https://doi.org/10.1177/00336882211002283
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Martha C Pennington
Birkbeck University of London, UK

Introduction
It has been a long time since Jack Richards and I (Pennington and Richards, 1986)
noted that pronunciation, once a central concern of language teaching, had been side-
lined in response to the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) movement empha-
sising meaning over form. Since then, attention to pronunciation has been revived,
with greater attention to suprasegmental phonology and other contextual aspects of
pronunciation (Pennington, 2019), even as language teaching has maintained a long-
standing focus on segmental phonology, enhanced by the affordances of technology.
The attention trained on pronunciation in the last three decades is affecting not only the
practice of language teaching but also language teaching research and theoretical dis-
cussions on language learning and use for communication in an interconnected world.
At the present time, I think it is safe to say that no one questions whether pronuncia-
tion is to have a place in the language curriculum. Yet there is plenty of room for discus-
sion about what is to be included in pronunciation as a curriculum area and the best ways
to go about teaching it. Although the amount of research on pronunciation teaching is
steadily increasing, there is still much more to explore about the effects and effectiveness
of different approaches at different stages of learning and levels of proficiency. The goals
of this issue and my editorial reflections on it are to paint a picture of the current state of
pronunciation teaching, to offer some critical perspectives, and to suggest some new pos-
sibilities and directions for the future.1

Trends in Pronunciation Teaching

Over the past few decades, pronunciation teaching has been affected by a number of
trends, as follows:

• greater acceptance of the mutability of pronunciation, and not only in childhood;

• greater understanding and acceptance of the relevance of social and psychological
factors to pronunciation;

Corresponding author:
Martha C Pennington, Birkbeck University of London, Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX, UK.
Email: marthap17022@yahoo.com
4 RELC Journal 52(1)

• multilingual orientations to pronunciation;

• intelligibility and communicative effectiveness as goals rather than correctness or
accuracy;
• communicative and task-based methodologies that combine a focus on meaning
with a focus on form;
• pronunciation taught in specific communicative contexts;
• high attention to advanced learners and those with employment-related needs in
pronunciation; and
• continuing development and improvement of applications of electronic resources
to pronunciation.

Greater Acceptance of the Mutability of Pronunciation, and Not Only in

Childhood
The 20th-century concept of an innate Universal Grammar (UG) providing a cognitive
structure and mechanisms for language acquisition in children, which was popularised
by Noam Chomsky (e.g. Chomsky, 1965), has largely been replaced by a usage-based
view of language learning as taking place in both childhood and adulthood through
general learning mechanisms applied to input from the learner’s environment (e.g.
Ellis, 2019; Tomasello, 2003; Wulff and Ellis, 2018). While the influence of first-lan-
guage (L1) phonological transfer on the pronunciation of a second or additional lan-
guage (L2) is undisputed (Flege, 1987; Flege and Hillenbrand, 1984; Flege et al.,
1995), it is possible for adult language learners to change their L1-influenced percep-
tion and articulation of an L2. According to Flege’s Speech Learning Model (SLM),
‘our phonetic systems remain adaptive over the life span and [can] reorganize to allow
for L2 sounds by adding new phonetic categories or modifying old ones’ (Flege, 1995:
233). However, this is not an easy or quick process, and it requires a high quality and
quantity of L2 input, as well as sufficient opportunities for L2 use in communication,
in order to reset perceptual and articulatory targets.

Greater Understanding and Acceptance of the Relevance of Social and

Psychological Factors to Pronunciation
In the prior period in which UG theories of language and language learning prevailed,
the contextual factors affecting language learning were at best a peripheral considera-
tion. As usage-based views of language learning have replaced UG views, the learner’s
context of learning and socialisation has come to be recognised as central to language
learning and use in both the L1 and L2, and as interactive with the learner’s personal
characteristics and experiences in affecting the development and expression of the self
as an individual and social being, including through pronunciation. Accordingly, mod-
ern models of language and language learning now give a central place to social and
psychological factors involving identity and speaker agency that affect all aspects of
language learning and use, including pronunciation (Douglas Fir Group, 2016; Ellis,
2019; Larsen-Freeman, 2019).
Editorial 5

Multilingual Orientations to Pronunciation

A major change of orientation in pronunciation can be seen in the 21st century (Pennington,
2015: 162ff), involving a shift away from what might be labelled a ‘completive’ view of
language learning as a process that has an endpoint where the learner completes the learn-
ing process to achieve full acquisition and become (virtually or nearly) indistinguishable
from a native speaker. Replacing this ‘completive’ view of language learning is an under-
standing (a) that language learning is never completed but continues throughout one’s
lifetime; (b) that all language learners and users are able to draw in their performance on
multiple models for their speech; and (c) that the learner and user of a second or additional
language is a bilingual or multilingual whose linguistic competence and performance are
influenced by their multiple languages. Their pronunciation will therefore show the effects
of multiple languages in both their non-deliberate (‘interlanguaging’) and intentional
(‘translanguaging’) behaviour. There have been widespread calls for tolerance of linguis-
tic difference (Coste et al., 2009) and for greater attempts by listeners to understand
speakers whose pronunciation is unfamiliar (Low, 2015: 130).

Intelligibility and Communicative Effectiveness as Goals Rather than

Correctness or Accuracy
Those who speak English as their first or native language are now in the minority, repre-
senting less than a quarter of the world’s population of English speakers, with the approxi-
mately one billion people who speak English as an L2 forming the global majority
(Babbel, 2021; Statistica, 2021). The fact that much communication worldwide occurs
among multilinguals who use English as their common L2 has opened discussion about
appropriate goals and priorities for a pronunciation curriculum aimed at preparing lan-
guage learners for communication in English as a lingua franca (ELF; Cruttenden, 2014;
Jenkins, 2000, 2002; Seidlhofer, 2011) – and in general, for communication in English as
an International Language (EIL) contexts (Low, 2015), including with L1 English speak-
ers. The EIL orientation, linked to ELF and World Englishes (Kachru, 1992), has in a
sense taken up the mantle of early CLT and maintained the pragmatism and the political
and ethical, learner-centred, position that pronunciation should not be a focus of instruc-
tion as long as meaningful communication occurs. It has also taken a strong position
regarding L2 speakers’ right to maintain a distinctive identity as a multicompetent, multi-
lingual speaker. Accordingly, the focus in pronunciation has shifted away from a native-
speaker model of correctness or accuracy to embrace L2 varieties and to assess
pronunciation in terms of such general goals as intelligibility (Levis, 2018) and commu-
nicative effectiveness (Pennington and Rogerson-Revell, 2019).

Communicative and Task-based Methodologies That Combine a Focus on

Meaning with a Focus on Form
The focus on context and meaning, a long-term trend in language teaching that has
stressed the importance of suprasegmental features and ‘top-down’ teaching of pronun-
ciation (Pennington, 1989, 2019), since the 1990s has come to include a ‘focus on form’
6 RELC Journal 52(1)

as an integral aspect of CLT (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010) and Task-based Instruction

(TBI) (Long, 2015) methodology and lesson design. In both of these communicative
orientations, lessons may begin with explicit instruction and controlled practice on the
mechanics and perception of specific segmental or suprasegmental features of pronun-
ciation that students will be encouraged to attend to in later meaningful communicative
activities.2 High Variability Phonetic or Perceptual Training (HVPT; Logan et al., 1991),
in which learners’ perception is trained by exposure to a pronunciation feature or contrast
as produced by multiple speakers in multiple contexts, is a common technique for work-
ing on perception. Work on production is typically accomplished by means of traditional
activities such as repetition practice and short oral readings focused on a particular pro-
nunciation feature or contrast. In a later part of a lesson, attention will be directed to the
pronunciation features that were the focus of explicit instruction when the need arises
during communicative practice, such as through corrections, clarification requests, and
other types of feedback. Research has shown that attention to pronunciation form, espe-
cially instruction on articulation given as a preparatory activity combined with corrective
feedback given during communicative practice, can improve both segmental and
suprasegmental pronunciation (Lyster et al., 2013; Saito, 2012; Saito and Saito, 2017).

Pronunciation Taught in Specific Communicative Contexts

In school and university settings, pronunciation may not be part of the main syllabus but
may be handled on an as-needed basis in response to learner performance. When part of
the syllabus, it is usually a consideration subsidiary to achieving other spoken language
goals, as in a CLT, TBI, or other type of oral skills curriculum. In contemporary practice,
pronunciation teaching is often designed around the communicative demands of specific
learning activities, tasks and topics, or the communicative needs of specific L2 speaker
groups, such as learners from a homogeneous L1 group or a particular employment
group (Pennington, 2019: 382). It is rare for pronunciation to be taught as an autonomous
subject or skill area, other than as an optional course usually geared for advanced learn-
ers wanting to improve their pronunciation or as an in-house course for L2 employees
whose work is affected by their pronunciation. In the former case, the pronunciation
course may be a comprehensive one or may target the particular problems of students in
the class. In the latter case, the pronunciation course is more likely to be a ‘Pronunciation
for Specific Purposes’ (PSP) course targeting work-related needs.

High Attention to Advanced Learners and Those with Employment-related

Needs in Pronunciation
In both teaching and research, pronunciation has received considerable attention in lan-
guage classes aimed at relatively advanced learners. It has also received considerable
attention outside of regular classrooms, in diverse contexts of employment where the
pronunciation of international employees and L2 English speakers has been observed to
negatively affect their job performance. Research to identify the sources of job-related
communication difficulties, including both segmental and suprasegmental or prosodic
aspects of pronunciation, and to develop teaching initiatives for remediating problems,
Editorial 7

has been carried out with L2 English-speaking factory workers (Derwing et al., 2014)
and international medical graduates (Khurana and Huang, 2013; Labov and Hanau,
2011) as well as with teaching assistants in universities and customer service representa-
tives in international call centres (for reviews on these last two groups, see Pennington
and Rogerson-Revell, 2019: 177–179; 348–351). On the flipside, which is also the
downside, of the substantial attention trained in pronunciation teaching and research on
advanced language learners and L2 English employee groups, pronunciation is generally
given limited consideration in beginning and lower-level classes,3 thus virtually ensuring
that it will need to be addressed later on.

Continuing Development and Improvement of Applications of Electronic

Resources to the Teaching and Learning of Pronunciation
Audio, video and electronic resources aligned with the internet are greatly changing the
potentials available to language teachers and learners for the delivery and the content of
instruction, with improvements to existing technologies and promising new applications
appearing in the last decade. Many kinds of technology can be of value for pronunciation
learning and teaching, both those which are specifically designed to work on pronuncia-
tion and those not so designed but which have been creatively applied to pronunciation
(Fouz-González, 2015a, 2015b). Of particular importance are the opportunities provided
by technology for online learning, individualised study and distance education using both
stand-alone and portable electronic devices, especially the smartphone. However, much
of the available technology continues to suffer from problems and limitations that impact
its value for teaching and learning pronunciation, especially in the areas of feedback and
non-segmental features (for review, see Pennington and Rogerson-Revell, 2019, ch. 5),
and a meta-analytical review of studies on pronunciation instruction (Lee et al., 2015)
suggests that instruction provided by a teacher is more effective than instruction provided
on computer. It is nonetheless hard to justify not incorporating technological resources
into language teaching, since the array of contemporary technologies can provide access
to many different kinds of input for students that would otherwise not be available and
since students are generally eager to learn with technology. The issue is then how best to
integrate technological resources into the larger instructional programme.

Overview of the Issue

This special topic issue of RELC Journal on Teaching Pronunciation responds to the cur-
rent high level of attention to the topic that has been building since the 1990s as a new
wave of activity in pronunciation within language learning and applied linguistics. The
issue is designed to review contemporary research and practice on pronunciation teach-
ing while also offering some fresh perspectives from scholars based in Singapore, Hong
Kong, Vietnam, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Spain and the United States. My
concept was for every contribution to have a focus on teaching while also referencing
research. It is organised as this state-of-the-art editorial giving critical perspectives on
the field and introducing the content of the issue, followed by four reviews of research
which draw implications for practice, four original investigations of pronunciation
8 RELC Journal 52(1)

teaching, and four innovative perspectives on teaching pronunciation, in addition to two

perspectives on pronunciation practice by leading authorities and a book review. This
content makes for a very full issue, which I believe the topic of pronunciation teaching
deserves.
In these unusually trying times of COVID-19 and movement of most interaction with
others to an online environment, I have been heartened by the ongoing attention paid by
the authors to their contributions and by their ready responses to comments from me and
from the RELC Journal reviewers and editorial staff. I have learned much from the
authors’ work and from my interactions with them and the other individuals involved in
this project, and the issue has benefitted much from the input of each of them as the con-
tent and form of the issue took shape over the past year and a half. I am especially grate-
ful to Professor David Levey of the University of Cádiz for taking on the responsibility
of reviewing and offering feedback on a majority of the contributions. His expertise and
insightful input have contributed significantly to the quality of the individual articles and
the issue as a whole. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and the RELC Journal
editorial staff who aided in the process of developing and finalising the issue, and espe-
cially to Marie Yeo, who provided strong support and guidance no matter what else she
had on her plate.
The issue opens with four research reviews that train wide-angle lenses on pronuncia-
tion. As reviewed by Ee Ling Low (‘EIL Pronunciation Research and Practice: Issues,
Challenges and Future Directions’), EIL is an important contemporary orientation to the
use of English in a global context which raises issues about appropriate norms for teach-
ing, learning and testing. In an EIL orientation, intelligibility is prioritised as a commu-
nicational and instructional goal, and, as Low stresses, achieving intelligibility requires
speakers to attend to the norms of listeners with varied language backgrounds. Low’s
contribution can help to raise teachers’ awareness of EIL and spark their thinking about
how to teach and to assess pronunciation in relation to multiple varieties.
Jette Hansen Edwards, Roy Chan, Toni Lam and Bobbie Wang review social factors
in pronunciation learning (‘Social Factors and the Teaching of Pronunciation: What the
Research Tells Us’) that influence learners’ exposure to and experience with the L2 and
their awareness of the social meaning of pronunciation, focusing on ethnic group identi-
fication, gender socialisation, and the social and cultural experience with language
gained in study abroad. Their practical suggestions are of general relevance for pronun-
ciation instruction, since all language learners can benefit from teaching and learning
activities which sharpen learners’ awareness of pronunciation features in a social
context.
Yui Suzukida (‘The Contribution of Individual Differences to L2 Pronunciation
Learning: Insights from Research and Pedagogical Implications’) reviews the key indi-
vidual differences of aptitude, L2 learning motivation and L2 pronunciation anxiety and
their relationships to pronunciation performance. Although some learners may have
natural advantages for pronunciation learning, instruction has the potential to improve
anyone’s language learning skills, such as through perceptual training and opportunities
to practise the language, and the teacher has the power to lower learners’ anxiety and
create positive motivation by setting up an encouraging and non-threatening classroom
environment.
Editorial 9

The final research overview (‘Multimodal Second-language Communication:

Research Findings and Pedagogical Implications’), which I co-authored with Debra M.
Hardison, considers speech as a multimodal performance with primary attention to
mouth movements and the arm and hand gestures that accompany speech. The research
shows that visual information significantly affects the perception of auditory information
and the overall comprehension of speech, and that there are cultural differences in both
the visual cues and the significance of specific cues for perception. A multimodal con-
ception of pronunciation recommends teaching both perception and production of pro-
nunciation with reference to the co-occurring gestures of mouth, face and body.
The section offering original investigations of pronunciation teaching opens with a
study by Nguyen Loc and Jonathan Newton (‘Enhancing EFL Teachers’ Pronunciation
Pedagogy through Professional Learning: A Vietnamese Case Study’) of pronunciation
teaching in university EFL classes in Vietnam based on a teacher professional learning
(TPL) workshop. Over an eight-week period, participating teachers successfully con-
ducted communicative pronunciation lessons in their classes developed collaboratively to
address problems Vietnamese learners face in pronouncing English. The effective design
features and positive results of this study can stand as a model for applying the TPL
approach to pronunciation pedagogy in other contexts of English language teaching.
Joshua Gordon (‘Pronunciation and Task-based Instruction: Effects of a Classroom
Intervention’) examines whether explicit instruction and practice on suprasegmental fea-
tures yields greater effects on pronunciation in complex communicative tasks than in
comparatively simple ones. Costa Rican university students taking an integrated-skills
EFL course received the same explicit instruction and practice exercises on supraseg-
mental phonology in all participating classes followed by communicative tasks that var-
ied by class as to level of complexity. Participants who performed the most complex
tasks improved significantly more in comprehensibility than those who performed the
less complex tasks. The results suggest that a short TBI intervention can be effective with
relatively complex tasks but may not show significant effects if tasks are relatively
simple.
Isabelle Darcy, Brian Rocca and Zoie Hancock investigate the teaching of pronuncia-
tion in oral skills classes in a content-based intensive English programme in the United
States (‘A Window into the Classroom: How Teachers Integrate Pronunciation
Instruction’). In classes where pronunciation teaching was explicitly integrated into the
syllabus – either within a communicative lesson design or without such a preset com-
municative orientation – a quarter to a third of class time was devoted to pronunciation,
largely as preplanned instruction. In comparison classes with no explicit focus on it, very
little time was devoted to pronunciation, which was largely handled in an ad hoc and
reactive manner. This classroom-based study mirrors surveys showing that pronuncia-
tion receives little attention unless specifically designed into instruction and also sug-
gests the potential for pronunciation teaching to be integrated into an oral skills class in
ways that do not necessarily follow a ‘standard’ communicative approach.
In the final original investigation, Graeme Couper responds to teachers’ questions and
concerns about the teaching of pronunciation (‘Pronunciation Teaching concerns:
Answering Teachers’ Questions’), drawing on his survey of non-native (NNEST) and
native (NEST) teachers from Uruguay and New Zealand. The teachers’ survey responses
10 RELC Journal 52(1)

range across questions about learner issues and differences; what to teach and how to
teach; curriculum, materials and time constraints; and the teachers’ own pronunciation
and knowledge of phonetics and phonology. The questions raised and the actions Couper
recommends should resonate with NNEST and NEST teachers in other contexts, helping
them to both identify and address their own issues with pronunciation teaching.
The first article describing an innovation in practice is that of Darren LaScotte,
Colleen Meyers and Elaine Tarone (‘Voice and Mirroring in SLA: Top-down Pedagogy
for L2 Pronunciation Instruction’). In contrast to traditional ‘bottom-up’ pronunciation
teaching approaches, ‘top-down’ approaches are supported by research showing that L2
learners, like all speakers, change their pronunciation in response to situational factors
and can modify their pronunciation in role play, drama, shadowing and other kinds of
activities in which they enact the voices of others. The authors describe one such
approach, that of the ‘Mirroring Project’ developed in work with international teaching
assistants (ITAs), in which students select a model speaker to emulate and then work to
imitate them as closely as possible. This novel approach to pronunciation grounded in
prior research and theory deserves further investigation.
Jonás Fouz-González and Jose A. Mompean (‘Phonetic Symbols in Contemporary
Pronunciation Instruction’) discuss the use of phonetic symbols, particularly, the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), in pronunciation teaching and learning. The
authors recommend using phonetic notation in perceptual training, in teaching contex-
tual effects, in raising awareness about the pronunciation features of different varieties
and registers, and in giving feedback on student performance. Phonetic notation can be a
useful tool for raising learners’ awareness of authentic pronunciation in different varie-
ties and different linguistic and social contexts, and their awareness of their own perfor-
mance in comparison to the range of options available in a multilingual world.
Piers Messum and Roslyn Young offer a practice-oriented article on teaching pronun-
ciation as a motor skill (‘Teaching Students to Pronounce English: A Motor Skill
Approach’). The authors observe that when language learners aim to match an acoustic
target, they generally cannot copy the actions used to produce the original sound, as most
of these are not visible. Learners’ attempts to match the target will usually fall short
because of the influence of L1 pronunciation patterns and their limited skill in perception
and production of the L2. Messum and Young therefore question teaching approaches
which rely on listen-and-repeat strategies for practice and for feedback on performance,
and instead maintain that language learners need coaching to develop the motor skills for
pronouncing the L2. Their recommended coaching activities are well-grounded and
would benefit from systematic study of their effectiveness.
Lynn Henrichsen’s contribution (‘An Illustrated Taxonomy of Online CAPT
Resources’) categorises and reviews online resources for pronunciation teaching.
Henrichsen notes that most computer-assisted pronunciation teaching (CAPT) resources
fall short of the ideals for automated instruction for L2 learners, particularly in the area
of feedback. In every category of the taxonomy he pinpoints some problems, while also
making special mention of some resources that he finds promising for L2 learners.
Teachers of pronunciation and spoken language skills more generally should find
Henrichsen’s taxonomy and his brief but insightful review a useful guide in selecting
technological resources.
Editorial 11

The issue includes two discussions of pronunciation teaching by leaders in the field, one
a Viewpoint on issues and directions for computer-assisted pronunciation training by
Pamela Rogerson-Revell and the other a Conversations with Experts featuring John Levis,
along with a review by Paul Dixon of English Pronunciation Teaching and Research:
Contemporary Perspectives, which Rogerson-Revell and I co-authored. In her issues-cen-
tred contribution, Rogerson-Revell (‘Computer-assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT):
Current Issues and Future Directions’) in a sense picks up where Henrichsen leaves off in
addressing concerns about the available CAPT resources for teaching as well as for testing,
raising questions about feedback and high-stakes automated pronunciation and speaking
tests that rely on automatic speech recognition (ASR) and other kinds of artificial intelli-
gence (AI). She predicts increasing use and adaptation of apps, bots, AI and gaming for
pronunciation teaching and learning while stressing the importance of teachers’ involve-
ment in the design of technologies which meet the needs of L2 learners.
The Conversations with Experts contribution is a wide-ranging and informative discus-
sion of pronunciation teaching by one of the most influential figures in the field – the editor
of the Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, a major researcher on pronunciation
teaching, and a long-time pronunciation teacher as well. Those with an interest in pronun-
ciation teaching may like to know about Levis’s background and can also learn from his
insights and recommendations on pronunciation teaching research, teacher education,
technology, and testing. Levis’s contemplation of a professional collaborative between
teachers and researchers to carry out pronunciation-teaching projects is an encouraging
sign of his continuing positive influence on the field.
Dixon’s book review highlights the two most practice-oriented chapters in English
Pronunciation Teaching and Research: Contemporary Perspectives, one on the context
of teaching and one on teachers and teaching methods, as potentially of most interest to
pronunciation teachers, while also noting the value of chapters that review pronunciation
technologies, assessment issues, and pronunciation beyond the classroom. He reinforces
a key theme of the book, that of maintaining close connections between pronunciation
teaching and research, and pronunciation teachers and researchers. He suggests that the
book would have benefited from further attention to technology by including an addi-
tional critique of a high-stakes test that uses automated scoring and an additional case
study on the use of pronunciation technology in the classroom.
Key take-aways from the articles in this issue include:

• the importance of the listener and attention to multiple varieties in L2 communi-

cation (Low);
• the central place of social (Hansen Edwards et al.) and individual factors
(Suzukida) in L2 pronunciation learning and teaching, including controllable ones
like interaction with L1 speakers, attention to pronunciation, and learner motiva-
tion and attitudes;
• the value of situating pronunciation in the larger physical context of communica-
tion (Hardison and Pennington; LaScotte et al.);
• the positive effects of professional development for teachers to jointly create
resources and try out new ideas for teaching pronunciation in their contexts of
instruction (Loc and Newton);
12 RELC Journal 52(1)

• empirical findings from two studies (Darcy et al.; Gordon) showing that a ‘stand-
ard’ communicative approach is neither necessary nor sufficient for improving
pronunciation teaching and learning outcomes, together with an overview
(LaScotte et al.) of how a rather novel communication-oriented approach can be
effective in altering pronunciation behaviour;
• evidence to show that teachers, especially NNESTs, are actively wrestling with
the teaching of pronunciation (Couper);
• two discussions addressing the problem of how to train attention on pronunciation
in a way that avoids or corrects for L1 phonological transfer, one through use of
phonetic notation (Fouz-González and Mompean) and the other through use of a
motor skill coaching approach (Messum and Young); and
• two contributions (Henrichsen; Rogerson-Revell) that emphasise the considerable
utility of many different types of technological resources and the still unrealised
potentials of the technologies for pronunciation.

In addition, the issue as a whole underscores the centrality of pronunciation to com-

munication and highlights the social and psychological as well as mechanical aspects of
pronunciation, while suggesting the potentials of both broad-based multimodal and more
narrowly targeted form-focused teaching for implementing communicative goals. The
issue reinforces the increasing importance of technology in language learning and teach-
ing, and the ongoing innovation and improvement of pronunciation technology, in spite
of persistent problems, especially with analysis of and feedback on learner performance.
It shows teachers grappling with many issues surrounding pronunciation, pointing to the
need for greater attention to pronunciation in teacher education and professional devel-
opment. It further suggests the value of collaboration among teachers and between teach-
ers and researchers in creating the best classroom practices and resources, including
technological ones.

The State of the Art – Where Are We Now?

It is exciting how much activity is going on in the teaching of pronunciation. Just look on
the internet to find so many intriguing teaching ideas and materials, many of them freely
accessible. It is also encouraging that so much research is being directed at the teaching
of pronunciation, with studies being published in journals like TESOL Quarterly,
Language Learning, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, RELC Journal, and the
dedicated pronunciation journal, Journal of Second Language Pronunciation. Saito and
Plonsky (2019: 653) note a ‘dramatic increase’ in published pronunciation research stud-
ies, from just 22 articles published in peer-reviewed international journals in the period
1982–2007 to 55 published in the 10-year period 2008–2017. It is also a positive sign of
the developing area of L2 pronunciation research that the studies which are being con-
ducted are grounded in strong research traditions in second language acquisition (SLA)
and applied linguistics and employ widely accepted research methods rigorously applied.
A further sign of the robust development of pronunciation teaching and research is that
the investigated pronunciation teaching methodologies are based squarely on language
learning and teaching theory grounded in SLA and on prior research results.
Editorial 13

Further evidence of development in pronunciation teaching and research can be seen

in the meta-analytical reviews being conducted to uncover key patterns and trends. In
addition to demonstrating that instruction on computer was less effective than instruction
by a teacher, a notable finding of Lee et al.’s (2015) meta-analytical review was that the
effects of pronunciation instruction were greater when instruction included both segmen-
tal and suprasegmental aspects. Sakai and Moorman’s (2018) 25-year meta-analytical
review on perception studies confirmed that perception training on L2 sounds could
positively affect production, though to a lesser extent than perception and with variable
effects depending on the type of sound trained. The detailed analyses of Saito and
Plonsky’s (2019) meta-analytical review moderate many prior claims about the effects of
pronunciation training, helping to pinpoint the effects and effectiveness of a large group
of studies carried out over a quarter century. Their findings suggest that pronunciation
teaching focused on production, perception, or both can produce measurable improve-
ment when assessed in controlled tasks according to specific measures of pronunciation
proficiency but may not produce measurable improvement when assessed in more spon-
taneous tasks or by global proficiency measures such as comprehensibility.

The State of the Art – Where Are We Not?

In spite of all the activity going on in pronunciation teaching, the field is not generally
very innovative. Most pronunciation teaching applies explicit, ‘focus-on-forms’ instruc-
tion done reactively and on-the-spot as a response to errors or designed into lessons as a
secondary consideration to achieving the primary lesson goals. Within regular language
classrooms, pre-planned pronunciation teaching is usually closely tied to a ‘standard’
language learning syllabus such as CLT or TBI, a content-based curriculum such as
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), or an older grammar-centred or lit-
erature-centred foreign-language (FL) curriculum. CLT and TBI approaches that incor-
porate a momentary focus on pronunciation within students’ negotiation of meaning in
communicative activities – the ‘focus-on-form’ methodology advocated by Long (1991,
2015) – often incorporate ‘focus-on-forms’ awareness-raising and controlled practice as
preparation for communicative practice, in a lesson sequence like that of Celce-Murcia
et al.’s (2010: 45–49) communicative framework for teaching English pronunciation.
Many of the techniques used for teaching pronunciation assume a learner with intermedi-
ate or advanced listening and speaking proficiency and knowledge of L2 grammar and
vocabulary. Yet what is taught about pronunciation at even the advanced level of instruc-
tion is relatively basic, and only scratches the surface of the meaningful contribution
which pronunciation makes to spoken language and communication more generally.
Innovations are disseminating to an extent, some teacher to teacher and via the inter-
net and others through conference presentations and publications, such as trials of the
Mirroring Project (Tarone and Meyers, 2018), of phonetic notation or keywords employed
with HVPT (Fouz-González and Mompean, 2020, in press), or various computer-based
applications (Fouz-González, 2015b). Yet most of the instructional initiatives that are
attracting significant amounts of research are of a similar type that has been built up over
time and supported by SLA theory and research. The mainstream studies of pronuncia-
tion teaching typically:
14 RELC Journal 52(1)

• focus on a specific pronunciation feature or contrasting set of features that impacts

lexical or clause-level meaning;
• teach the focal pronunciation feature(s) as an ‘add-on’ to an existing language
learning curriculum;
• apply traditional explicit instructional methodology, moving from form-focused
input and controlled practice to freer communicative practice; and
• are carried out with relatively advanced students or late-stage learners, aiming to
remediate pronunciation problems that interfere with communication.

Given these typical characteristics of pronunciation teaching initiatives that are attract-
ing the most research, what is not attracting significant attention from researchers are
initiatives which:

• focus on pronunciation in a global or comprehensive way;

• teach pronunciation as a central aspect of a language learning curriculum;
• apply non-traditional instructional methodology, especially lesson designs that
diverge significantly from the sequence of form-focused input and controlled
practice followed by communicative practice; and
• are carried out not only with relatively advanced students or late-stage learners,
aiming to remediate pronunciation problems that interfere with communication,
but with beginning students and early-stage learners, aiming to limit or avoid
pronunciation problems that interfere with communication.

Although the number of carefully designed and published research studies on pronuncia-
tion teaching is growing exponentially, the narrow or restricted focus of those studies can
be considered a limitation. In addition, it is rare for instructional studies to feature truly
spontaneous speech as either a teaching goal or a measure of performance (Saito and
Plonsky, 2019). A further limitation of the pronunciation teaching research is the small
proportion of studies that have been carried out for languages other than English (e.g. in
the primary studies included in the meta-analysis of Saito and Plonsky, 2019: 50–53).
The current state of the art offers an opportunity to add innovative initiatives and research
on pronunciation teaching in English and other languages to the growing number of sys-
tematic investigations of pronunciation pedagogy.
There is also a need to sort out some terminological and conceptual issues that are
pervasive in the field, impacting research and instruction in L2 pronunciation, involving
intelligibility, communicative teaching, and notions of ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’
teaching and learning.

Intelligibility
In the most widely accepted conceptualisation, Munro et al. have defined ‘intelligibility’
as ‘the extent to which a speaker’s utterance is actually understood’, contrasting it with
‘comprehensibility’ as ‘the listener’s estimation of difficulty in understanding an utter-
ance’ (2006: 112). Intelligibility is usually conceived as the ability to identify the words
that a speaker utters in sequence, typically measured by having listeners transcribe
Editorial 15

recorded words or sentences which the speaker has read aloud. This is the sense of intel-
ligibility applied in most research that has used it as a measure of pronunciation profi-
ciency, and it also seems to be the conception of intelligibility on which Jenkins (2000)
based her intelligibility-oriented recommendations for the teaching of pronunciation,
since these are largely focused on word-level distinctions in phonemes and stress place-
ment, with attention to the utterance level only in terms of clausal stress or prominence.
Levis has offered a broader definition of intelligibility as the ‘understanding of a spo-
ken message’, whether in terms of ‘lexical identification, meaning, or intention’ (2018:
20). In his broader view (Levis, 2018: 35–41), the pronunciation features related to intel-
ligibility include word-level features (segmentals and word stress), discourse-level fea-
tures (rhythm and intonation), and a set of related areas (fluency, rate, voice quality and
loudness) that affect the meaning and interpretation of an utterance. In the framework of
Saito and Plonsky (2019), intelligibility can be grouped together with comprehensibility,
accentedness and fluency to form a set of intuitive global measures of pronunciation
proficiency. These global measures are to be differentiated from specific measures of L2
pronunciation, comprising expert ratings (e.g. of segmental and suprasegmental features)
and quantitative measurements (e.g. fundamental frequency and articulation rate) as
separable domains of assessment.
Designing tasks to produce valid speech samples from L2 speakers and valid meas-
ures of intelligibility – especially speech samples and intelligibility measures that can
ferret out speaker intentions – presents considerable challenges (Pennington and
Rogerson-Revell, 2019, ch. 6). These challenges include the fact that intelligibility is not
a straightforward measure of pronunciation proficiency and in fact encompasses factors
that can compensate for some level of phonological unintelligibility, such as clarification
by grammatical, lexical and non-verbal means. Intelligibility is also dependent on listen-
ers’ lexicogrammatical knowledge as well as their familiarity with the topic and the
speaker’s pronunciation (Browne and Fulcher, 2017). Given the central place of intelli-
gibility in current L2 pronunciation theory, research, and teaching practice, it is impor-
tant to be clear what it means and how it is to be measured. What intelligibility
encompasses and how it is to be operationalised in research are currently undecided
matters in a field whose core constructs and emphases are undergoing significant change.

Communicative Teaching
There has been considerable attention in research to pronunciation teaching initiatives
focused on a few kinds of instructional intervention, such as HVPT and explicit focus-on-
forms teaching centred on one or a few pronunciation features within a communicative
lesson design. Yet such lessons are at best communicative in only the final stage, and often
not even then, as they do not quite achieve ‘free’ or spontaneous communication. Much of
what is labelled a ‘communicative’ approach is in practice traditional and form-focused
with some attention to meaning and communicative features or tasks included, often with
relatively open-ended, meaningful pair or small-group spoken interaction as the final les-
son activity. The model for this lesson design is Celce-Murcia et al.’s (2010: 45, figure
P2.2) communicative framework for teaching English pronunciation, which includes the
phases of 1-Description and Analysis, 2-Listening Discrimination, 3-Controlled Practice,
16 RELC Journal 52(1)

4-Guided Practice and 5-Communicative Practice. The five phases are intended as a sys-
tematic progression from awareness-raising to metacognitive control based on various
types of controlled practice leading to communicative practice that incorporates a focus
on form. This is a relatively diverse and complex lesson design, containing many different
kinds of instructional components. A resulting issue in research on communicative initia-
tives is that it is difficult to know which of the diverse components or combination of
components contributed any positive effects or lack of positive effects to findings.
The ‘standard’ communicative lesson is obviously a quite specific concept of a com-
municative lesson, one which has developed over a long period reaching back at least to
audiolingualism and the language teaching techniques developed in the mid-1950s as
part of that approach and later in response to audiolingual methodology in communica-
tive, task-based and content-based approaches. In this now ‘standard’ communicative
approach, ‘communicative’ has generally been defined and operationalised in a way that
falls short of truly spontaneous speech and the full context of communication. It gives
little or no attention to pronunciation as a social indicator nor to the interconnections
between pronunciation, facial expression, gesture and body movement in conveying and
interpreting meaning. It also does not teach what might be considered advanced func-
tions of pronunciation as linked to identity and social positioning, as a key aspect of
communicative effectiveness in specific contexts of communication and employment,
and as interactive with other linguistic and non-verbal resources in creating culturally
specific meanings. The possibilities for new kinds of communicative approaches and
lesson designs are waiting to be explored. In the meantime, it is important to keep in
mind that the sense of ‘communicative’ teaching which prevails in SLA is a very spe-
cific, tradition-bound one.

‘Top-down’ and ‘Bottom-up’ Teaching and Learning

The terms ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ have been used in the L2 literature in a number of
senses (Pennington, 2019: 380–81) that could be more carefully distinguished. It has
become common for approaches that begin with or focus on segmentals to be called
‘bottom-up’, on the assumption that teaching the segmental phonemes of a language
provides the building blocks from which spoken language is constructed and so should
be taught first and as the focus of pronunciation instruction. A ‘top-down’ orientation is
then one which starts from or focuses on the higher – suprasegmental or prosodic – level
of pronunciation. The ‘top-down’/‘bottom-up’ contrast in this sense is similar to that
between a ‘macro’ versus ‘micro’ orientation, and similar to the sense of ‘top-down’ as
referring to contextualised pronunciation teaching, as opposed to decontextualised ‘bot-
tom-up’ teaching (Pennington, 1989).
‘Top-down’ teaching of pronunciation has also been equated to communicative teach-
ing in contrast to ‘bottom-up’ structuralist teaching (Dalton and Seidlhofer, 2000) or to a
‘top-down’ (or ‘top- level’) focus on meaning versus a ‘bottom-up’ (or ‘bottom’ level)
focus on form. With respect to pronunciation, a focus on form can refer to speech pro-
cessing based on immediate perception (listening with attention strictly to sound or
speaking with attention strictly to articulation) as contrasted with speech processing
based on knowledge gained from previous experience and stored in long-term memory,
Editorial 17

including knowledge of the L1 as well as prior learning of the L2. A further sense of the
contrast of ‘bottom-up’ versus ‘top-down’ is that of acting or processing information
non-deliberately or implicitly versus deliberately or explicitly. One way in which the
distinction between deliberate control versus non-deliberate control can be applied to
pronunciation is the sense of a speaker deliberately styling pronunciation as an ‘act of
identity’ (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller, 1985) versus a speaker’s pronunciation being on
‘auto-pilot’ or controlled by L1 transfer.
Regardless of the sense of the ‘top-down’/‘bottom-up’ distinction that is intended, it
seems clear that pronunciation involves both types of emphasis. It is therefore relatively
pointless to make what is essentially a political argument in favour of one or the other
orientation as the exclusive focus of pronunciation instruction. Rather than ‘either-or’,
the teaching of pronunciation can embrace a ‘both-and’ orientation to instruction, incor-
porating ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ elements of learning and performance.

Recommendations for the Future

More careful attention needs to be given to the constructs and methodologies underlying
instructional initiatives in research studies. In addition, more systematic analysis is
needed of the contribution of the different instructional components in pronunciation
teaching initiatives to the results of the instructional intervention. There is also a need for
comparison of interventions at different levels of proficiency, from complete beginners
to intermediate and advanced level, and at different stages of instruction, from the begin-
ning of the lesson as an awareness-raising focus, to the core of the lesson as the main
focus, to the late stages of the lesson as an auxiliary focus to do with intelligibility or
communicative effectiveness. A major need is for more research on well-grounded inno-
vative and non-mainstream approaches to the teaching of pronunciation in English and
other languages.
It would be worthwhile, for instance, to conduct more systematic investigations of the
effects of various forms of contextualised imitative pronunciation instruction (e.g. shad-
owing, mirroring, roleplay) and other theoretically grounded ‘top-down’ methods which
do not follow standard practices for teaching pronunciation as a focus-on-form within a
recognised ‘communicative’ syllabus, but which have shown promise in published stud-
ies. Since it seems that pronunciation learning occurs rapidly in the early months of
learning a language and then ‘plateaus’ or ‘stagnates’ (Munro and Derwing, 2008), it
would be of value to move away from the nearly exclusive emphasis on relatively
advanced or late-stage learners and to intensively investigate pronunciation teaching at
the early stage of language learning, with attention to developing appropriate pronuncia-
tion methodology for beginners.
In addition, approaches that challenge standard practices on theoretical grounds
deserve to be systematically investigated and their effects and effectiveness compared to
those of the standard practices. These might include such norm-breaking practices as
teaching pronunciation as a primary focus for the first months of instruction; teaching
pronunciation as a key area within a broad intelligibility emphasis for speaking and lis-
tening (see below); or replacing ‘listen-and-repeat’ strategies for learning with ‘close
listening’ involving active and reflective listening, together with coaching techniques for
18 RELC Journal 52(1)

building motor skills. Last but not least, continuing research and development is needed
on applications of technology to pronunciation teaching, learning, and the assessment of
performance – both those designed to specifically focus on pronunciation and creative
applications of other kinds of technology.
Given the prevalence of communicational encounters worldwide in which at least one
participant is an L2 speaker and the potentials for communication breakdown and mis-
understanding based on both segmental and suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation,
there is an obvious role for language teachers, and pronunciation teachers in particular,
to work on not only speaker behaviour but also listener behaviour to ensure mutual
understanding. The shift from viewing intelligibility as a speaker-based performance or
production factor to recognising the important role played by the listener in intelligibility
gives direction for teaching to train learners as listeners and partners in interaction who
share the onus for intelligibility. Such an instructional goal goes beyond ‘communicative
competence’ defined on the language learner as speaker, to one of ‘interactional compe-
tence’ defined on the language learner as both speaker and listener.
The clarification requests that are an aspect of CLT methodology can be part of
what is stressed for the listener role, in addition to strategies for paraphrasing or restat-
ing a speaker’s last utterance as a check on understanding, such as in the empathic,
reflective listening techniques developed by Carl Rogers (e.g. Rogers, 1980). The
reflective listening techniques can be extended by attention to the decoding and inter-
pretation of pronunciation as well as active listening ‘around’ the speaker’s pronuncia-
tion, that is, to other linguistic and non-verbal cues to the speaker’s meaning. Listeners
would then be applying both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’, in the sense of Dirven and
Oakshott-Taylor (1984) – or ‘macro’ and ‘micro’, in the sense of Richards (1983) –
listening strategies to the processing of heard speech. The flipside of this orientation
requires the speaker to tailor communication, including pronunciation, to the expected
needs of the listener. In the best case, this would entail using communication enhance-
ment strategies, such as prosodic highlighting (e.g. through change in pitch or volume)
and moderation of the rate of utterance, and coordinating pronunciation cues with lexi-
cal, grammatical and non-verbal output. In the worst case, it would lead speakers to
restrict or degrade their communication – an outcome that teachers would need to
make learners aware of as a danger to avoid.
Thus, the teaching of pronunciation for international intelligibility, taken in the broad
sense of intelligibility elaborated by Levis (2018) and of English as an international lan-
guage elaborated by Low (2015, this issue), starts from a very broadly contextualised
(‘top-down’) focus on communication that is recognised to have a multilingual, multi-
cultural basis and to require empathic and collaborative effort by all interactants in order
to achieve mutual understanding.4 In this conception of the teaching of pronunciation,
communicative practice will incorporate multi-turn interaction with the goal of jointly
creating shared meaning. An internationally oriented conception of communication thus
sets a high bar for language teaching to build learners’ interactional competence as both
speakers and listeners equipped to function in a multilingual–multicultural world, with
pronunciation viewed as playing a constructive and supportive role among other com-
municative resources.
Editorial 19

ORCID iD
Martha C Pennington https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3254-6281

Notes
1. For a more extensive discussion of pronunciation teaching, research findings, and recommen-
dations for practice, see Pennington (forthcoming).
2. In the distinction that Long (1991) made between focus-on-forms (plural) and focus-on-form
(singular) activities, the preparatory work is in the first category while the attention to form
within negotiation of meaning is in the second category.
3. Only a small minority of the studies published between 1982 and 2017 that were reviewed
by Saito and Plonsky (2019) involve beginning or early-stage learners (e.g. Saito and Saito,
2017).
4. As an excellent illustration of such an international communicative orientation, see the
wide range of empathic and collaborative multilingual–multicultural strategies displayed by
English language teachers from ASEAN countries in a discussion recorded at the Regional
English Language Centre (RELC) in Singapore (Kirkpatrick, 2010).

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