Is pronunciation really such an essential component of communicative

competence?

A general accepted goal of pronunciation teaching is to help learners to

achieve a comfortably intelligible pronunciation rather than a native one.
Therefore, it is relevant to improve those L2 linguistic features that affect
the learners ability to communicate successfully. Until the last decades
little attention was paid on pronunciation teaching, for language
teaching was mainly focused on the mastery of grammar and
vocabulary. Pronunciation was something almost casual, devoted mainly
to the pronunciation teaching of isolated words, if it happened.

Nowadays there is a total agreement among English language teachers

that pronunciation teaching is relevant if we want learners to achieve a
successful command of the language. Celce stated in 1987 that, a
threshold level of pronunciation in English such that if a given non-
native speakers pronunciation falls below this level, he or she will not
be able to communicate orally no matter how good his or her control of
English grammar and vocabulary might be.(Celce-Murcia.1987:5).

Students should be familiarized with the sounds of the target language

but teaching should not be only an issue of teaching pronunciation of
isolated sounds or words separately, as for words rarely exist in isolation
but immersed in a phonological flow of a sentence and their
pronunciation will vary when immersed in this flow of speech. Besides
research has proved that even if students succeed in producing a word
correctly they usually fail when they find themselves producing the same
word in fluent speech.

Most of students of English who have been to an English spoken country

usually have problems to understand native English people, regarding
English a succession of incomprehensible sounds, with no spaces at all
between words. Actually there are so many factors that take place in
casual conversation which affect pronunciation so as to make the
language sound fluent and not mechanical. This is due to the existence
of weak forms in their language that leads to reduction, assimilation and
elision which are features of the connected speech in English.

By knowing the differences of the two languages the teacher will be able
to foresee the difficulties that students may encounter when producing
the target language. The problem could mainly rely on the fact that non-
native speaker teachers may lack the confidence of a native one, but at
the same time a non-native teacher will probably be a little bit more
sensitive to the particular phonetic issues involved and to the L1
interferences. In fact, when a student realizes the differences in sounds
between his/her L1 and the target language, he/she will start trying to
produce them correctly

Teachers role should not be the one of a mere pronunciation checker,

but the one of noticing the students pronunciation mistakes, which must
not be seen as a failure but as part of the students process of
pronunciation learning. Teachers must supply information, give model
from time to time, offer suggestions and constructive feedback about
students' performance , if not these mistakes highly risk to become
fossilized.

Therefore, students can be expected to do well in pronunciation if the

pronunciation class is taken out of isolation and becomes an integral
part of the oral communication class. From this, we can state, that
pronunciation must be always considered during the lesson. Morley
(1991) states the need for the integration of pronunciation with oral
communication, more emphasis on individual learners needs, meaningful
task-based practices, development of new strategies for the teaching,
and introducing peer correction and group interaction. Furthermore,
Gilbert (1984), states that the skills of pronunciation, listening and
comprehension are interdependent, so teachers must give the students
situations in the classroom to develop pronunciation by listening and
speaking.

If we are dealing with children, for example, it would seem quite absurd
to teach them pronunciation by explicit explanation. Actually, teachers
must take advantage of the fact that children in early age can acquire
languages easily, just by being immersed to it. For them, songs, poems
and chants are excellent lesson activities. On the other hand, if teachers
are teaching teenagers or adults, they can help students in the process
of learning pronunciation by giving certain explanations about English
pronunciation. In this way we make the students aware not only of how
words may change pronunciation when in fluent speech, but also how a
message in a utterance may change according to certain
suprasegmental features.

Teachers should include pronunciation in their lessons, otherwise the

learners ability to communicate is severely limited. The goal of
pronunciation teaching should be developing students intelligibility, that
is to say, developing an English spoken language which could be
understood by any speaker of English (native or non-native).
Pronunciation should not be viewed only as a correct production of
phonemes but it must be viewed in the same light as grammar, syntax
and discourse which is crucial part of communication.

BIBLIOGRAPY
Ball, P. (2013). Teaching Pronununciation. Funiber
Jenkins, J. (2002). Global English and the Teaching of Pronunciation
Otlowski, M. (2004). Pronunciation: What are the Expectations?