Pronunciation is an integral part of foreign language learning since it directly affects learners' communicative competence as well as performance. Limited pronunciation skills can decrease learners’ self-confidence, restrict social interactions, and negatively affect estimations of a speaker’s credibility and abilities. We as teachers are comfortable teaching reading, writing, listening, and to a degree, general oral skills, but when it comes to pronunciation we often lack the basic knowledge of articulatory phonetics to offer our students anything more than primary instructions. According to Elliot (1995), teachers tend to view pronunciation as the least useful of the basic language skills and therefore they generally sacrifice teaching pronunciation to spend valuable class time on other areas of language.
Students pick their pronunciation from their instructor, as they do well when the instructors articulate and speak in a way that the students can hear clearly. Day drills in pronunciation will gradually improve students’ pronunciation. As teachers, we can make the most of the time by using words that are troublesome, words with sounds that are challenging to hear. We have to remember that some of the learners have not been exposed to some of the sounds in English in their entire life. They did not have a reason or opportunity to develop the muscles in the tongue, mouth, and throat that are specific to those sounds. Teachers can try mimicking the sounds of a language that is alien to their ears to get the feeling for how difficult it is for some of the students. Classroom materials and activities for teaching EFL pronunciation are in no way exhaustive, but substantially useful when they are used based on feasibility and suitability in a particular environment having particular learners. Besides, according to Morley (1991, p.50), the teacher can implement the role of a speech coach or pronunciation coach who, rather than just correcting the learner's errors and mistakes, supplies information, gives models, offers cues, suggestions and constructive feedback about the performance, sets high standards, provides a wide variety of practice opportunities, and overall supports and encourages the learner.
Based on these points, I believe it is equally important to focus on aspects of pronunciation features in our pedagogical mediation praxis and be more selective in instruction depending on the students’ proficiency levels, the amount of time available, and any other constraints are opportunities to improve our apprentices’ clear speech and intelligibility. To achieve this, several creative ways can be considered. However, English phonetics and pronunciation pedagogical mediation could be a possibility no only to overcome students' English
References
Morley. J. 1991, The pronunciation component in teaching English to speakers of other languages. TESOL Quarterly, 25/1 pp. 51-74.
Elliot, A. R. (1995). Foreign Language Phonology: Field independence, attitude, and the success of formal instruction in Spanish pronunciation. The Modern Language Journal, 79(iv), 530-542. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/330005