Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Didactics - English -
Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 2,0, University of Augsburg
(Phil-Hist Fakultät), course: Teaching and Learning English
Pronunciation, language: English, abstract: In the course of the last
three decades a whole new prominence has been granted to the
significance of foreign language (FL) learning. Due to the recent
development of globalization, further emerging of multi-national
enterprises and the coalescence of the European Union, this appears to
be the logical consequence. Because of its nowadays widely accepted
status as a lingua franca (Acar 2006) the learning and teaching of
English as the most frequently spoken second language has gained
importance - in Germany as well as in most industrialized countries
speaking prevalently another first language (L1). In the recent past,
since the end of the 19th century, changing trends have focused on
different methods of language teaching, such as the ability to translate
texts, correct use of grammar, or wide range of vocabulary. However, the
teaching of English pronunciation finally has come back into the focus
of interest since the second half of the 1980s due to the mentioned
economic and social changes. Nowadays the ability to (net-) work
internationally - and thus reach the "ultimate goal of communication
with other speakers of the second language" (Brown 1994: 226) seems to
be one of the highest goals of achievement of second language (L2)
learning. During the time of almost one century of pronunciation
teaching the attitude towards the issue has changed as well: as Chun
(1991: 179) states in her article, the development started from a
segmental and comparative sound repetition learning strategy, followed
by a period of simply ignoring the topic completely from the 1960s to
the early 1980s, leading finally to the up-to-date approach of teaching
suprasegmentals, sentence intonation as well as other aspects of
connected speech. The most curre
