I will focus on history of teaching pronunciation because I am very interested in it. In language teaching, grammer and vocabulary have been forcused more than pronunciation (Classical method, Grammer translation method).
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Direct method was popular. In this method, the pronunciation was taught through the intuition and imitation, because natural way for children to acquire thier first language. And then, Naturalistic method, including Total physical response and Natural approach, were proposed. In these methods, teacher have students just listen and give them many inputs till students are ready to speak with a petty good pronunciation.
In the 1940s and 1950s, two approaches were proposed, Audiolingualism in the United States and Oral Approach in Britain. Sine both approaches are influenced by reform movement.
In the 1960s, Cognitive code learning was proposed. This approach viewed languages as rule-governed behavior rather than habit formation. That is why pronunciation deemphasized.
In the 1970s, disigner methods such as silent way and community language learning were proposed. In the community language learning, this is client-centered lerning, which means that students can completely control what they study. Futhermore, teacher's function is human computer, which also means that students can ask whatever they want. If we want to use this approach, teachers have to be bilingual because students ask with thier native language and teacher translate with target language.
In the 1980s Communicative approach was proposed. In this approach, the aim is of course to teach how to communicate. The main purpose is to provide students with intelligible pronunciation. Traditionally the focus of teaching pronunciation has sifted from segmental features to suprasegmental features, and nowadys we focus on both features because both features are important in order to learn intelligible pronunciation.
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While I appreciate the summary, I was looking forward to discovering what you thought about what you read and how they related to your own experience as a learner and a teacher.
I think it is interesting how our blogs are reflecting how we speak. I noticed that when I'm writing in the blog I tend to leave out some of my function words (mostly the word "the") and I focus more on the content of my speech than I do on how it is written. And when I am reading your blog Kizuna I can hear how you would speak it which I thought was kind of interesting.
I totally agree with your last sentence of the segmental and suprasegmental features being equally important for learning pronunciation. I have different experiences with pronunciation. In some countries, and Ukraine is one of them, pronunciation is considered less important, as teachers believe that in order for a foreigner (for example, an American) to understand us, we need to know grammar very well. But I have experienced it myself that if you mispronounce a word it's much harder for a person to understand you, than if you put a verb in the wrong tense.
In addition, it has been very awkward for me to find out that the pronunciation I have been learning in school is much closer to the American pronunciation, than to the British one. Although, the teachers have always told us that we were learning the British pronunciation.
While teaching pronunciation, an instructor has to pay attention to a lot of details: the first language of the student, the most common mistakes he makes, the sounds that are the hardest to pronounce, and so on. In addition, pronunciation is not a set of rules one can learn once and for all. It requires constant practice.
Nowadays, one can acquire good pronunciation even without the help of an instructor, as there are so many softwares available (http://oregonstate.edu/~healeyd/tesol2002/pron.html), that the only required thing is patience (and probably money).
Kizuna... That was a friggen' novel. But, they synopsis was good ;).
Oh yeah, soccer is on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Tuesdays 9ish-11
Fridays 7ish-9...
...Meyers Field House.
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