It's important to work on students' pronunciation regularly and often:
Jay Doubleyou: pronunciation: getting students to understand better and to be better understood
And to make that possible, teachers need to feel confident and prepared to teach pronunciation.
There are lots of resources to help:
How to teach pronunciation communicatively? – PronSIGFun Ways to Teach Pronunciation – TEFL Barcelona - TEFL Spain
And the latest E L Gazette looks at a new book that offers further help - especially to 'non-native' teachers:
Teaching English Pronunciation for a Global World
Authors Robin Walker and Gemma Archer discuss how they empower educators to feel confident and prepared to teach pronunciation in a time where the practice has fallen to the wayside.
For far too long, pronunciation teaching has been left out on the margins of English language teaching. From the central position it occupied in early teaching methods, we have reached the point today where some coursebooks carry no explicit pronunciation work at all.
In part, this is because successful pronunciation teaching is a complex mix of the ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘how’ and ‘who to’ – a mix that can be difficult to get right. In addition, unlike grammar or vocabulary, pronunciation has a significant component of skills acquisition. This requires teachers to come to the classroom equipped with a range of tricks and tools that they can use to get learners to do things with their mouths that often feel completely foreign to them. In this respect, the language teacher is very much like a sports coach or dance instructor. The aim is to get learners to do things rather than to know about them. Knowledge alone is not enough.
Aware of the unique nature of pronunciation teaching, in ‘Teaching English Pronunciation for a Global World’ we have been as careful as possible to take teachers into account, and to support them in a number of ways.
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