INNOVA Research Journal 2018, Vol 3, No. 4, pp. 44-56
Introducción
English is one of the most spoken languages around the world. Millions of people use this
language as their mother tongue, their second or their foreign language. Regarding Ecuador,
even though Spanish is the mother tongue, the need to learn English and have effective
communication skills in this language is imposed, like in most countries, mainly by business
opportunities, the educational system requirements, the possibility of traveling or studying
abroad, the social demands such as cultural expectations and globalization. (Marginson & van
der Wende, 2006)
Research about learning pronunciation in a second language or foreign language has been
very limited until the beginning of the 21st century. As Derwing and Munro (2005) mentioned,
pronunciation had become a casualty of Communicative Language Teaching before this century.
This approach gives emphasis to the meaning of a word and pays little attention to pronunciation,
under the belief that exposure will improve pronunciation. However, after 2005, several L2
pronunciation studies have appeared in the literature, especially in theses or conference papers.
For instance, we can refer to the annual conference Pronunciation in Second Language Learning
and Teaching or the new Journal of Second Language Pronunciation. These latest initiatives have
placed L2 pronunciation as an area worthy of investigation.
Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (1996) established that pronunciation is the
foundation of speaking. Furthermore, they claim that the most important part of learning a
second language “rests on pronunciation” since it allows students to express their ideas and have
effective communication with native speakers (p. 23). Unfortunately, in Ecuador the importance
of teaching pronunciation is ignored by a large number of teachers who prefer to pay more
attention to grammar or vocabulary, somehow ignoring the fact that in everyday spoken
language, the most important thing to be considered is appropriate pronunciation.
The process of learning pronunciation can be affected by many factors like age,
motivation, methods and quality of teaching, as well as the influence of the learner´s mother
tongue (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 1996). Regarding the learner´s language, if the
sounds or phonemes of the mother tongue are similar to the ones on the target language, it
becomes an advantage when learning pronunciation, but the non-existence of particular English
sounds in the mother tongue has proved to be a problem for the students. For instance, according
to Tritch (2016), learners face merging problems when they pronounce the new sounds in
terms of the speech sounds of their mother tongue or substitution problems when the
learners wrongly substitute a new sound with the most similar sound they know.
Tritch (2016) remarks that merging and substitution can cause serious problems of intelligibility
and communication breakdowns. The definitions of merging and substitution proposed
by Tritch are used in the current research to understand and analyze some common
pronunciation problems made by learners.
The interest for reviewing this topic occurred because on a regular basis, teachers face
learners who have a good knowledge of grammar structures and vocabulary, but perform very
poorly on speaking mainly because of their pronunciation. The aim of this paper is to provide
teachers a theoretical background about the relevance of teaching pronunciation and offer some
Revista de la Universidad Internacional del Ecuador. URL: https://www.uide.edu.ec/
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