the differences between teaching pronunciation/writing to 'native speakers' and to esl/esol/tefl students

Pronouncing and writing cat, cut and cart in English is not really a problem for 'native speakers', as its' pretty transparent because the way you say it and the way you write it is obvious. It is, however, a problem for ESL/ESOL/TEFL learners, simply because the sounds might not exist in their own mother tongues.

A for the "curvaceous young phoneme called schwa...", the challenge for 'native speakers' is that they can pronounce it no problem but won't be able to spell it [do I write 'introverted' or 'intraverted'?], whereas the ESL/ESOL/TEFL learner will have a problem not to over-pronounce the weak syllable. 

So, the methods to help one group learn English will not necessarily apply to another group.

Transcribing English text to phonetic transcription would be unnecessary for the average British school pupil as they don't need to learn the English phonemes; this would only be of use later on when wanting to better understand the language at an academic level. It would be more useful to learn the phonetic alphabet for someone learning the language who has not been brought up with it - but it is by no means essential.

So, someone who hears the target language everyday and everywhere does not need to do the hard work of 'picking up/acquiring' the language, whereas someone outside that milieu does - but, then, there are some great tricks and methods for using pronunciation in and out of the ESL/ESOL/TEFL classroom.

As for the 'native speaker' student, at British and American primary/early grade levels, there has been some controversy about the methods used. In a critique of phonics, the likes of linguistics professor Stephen Krashen is a strong advocate of the whole language approach to the teaching of reading, and has written many articles in support of it. In essence, whole language proponents claim that children learn to read most enjoyably and efficiently by exposure to interesting stories that are made comprehensible to them through pictures and discussions. This is in contrast to structured decoding programmes (usually designated phonics) in which children learn to read by sounding out the various parts of words.

Children's writer and educationalist Michael Rosen asked a decade ago: Can split digraphs help children learn to read and write? - and that Some children find this useful, some find it confusing:

What is a split digraph? The words “bit” and “bite” differ both in the way they are spelled and the way they are said. The letter “e” indicates a way of saying the vowel between the “b” and the “t”. Advertisers make them up: “lite”. This tells us there’s a pattern here. Educationists say that drawing children’s attention to this helps them with reading and spelling.

And another educator explains why the split spelling cracks me up.

Finally, it does seem that it's all about simply doing lots of reading and lots of listening - whether the students grew up with the language or come to it later in life. In other words, to acquire a language you need lots of comprehensible input!

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