We teach pronunciation using ‘listen and repeat’ exercises because that’s how it’s always been done, and because common sense seems to say that it should work even if it doesn’t. The generally poor results we get in the classroom are usually ascribed to listening problems. Instead, they are more likely to be the result of two basic misconceptions: the widespread notions (1) that speech sounds (and timing phenomena) can be learnt by imitation, and (2) that children do this when learning L1. From a theoretical perspective these notions are both dubious. With respect to the second, not only is there no evidence that children learn to pronounce this way, but evidence is accumulating that they do not. It is more likely that their bootstrap into the sound system is the imitative exchanges in infancy where their caregivers reflect their utterances back to them, reformulated into L1syllables. This basic paradigm can be reworked for the classroom, and has been successfully applied for many years by teachers using Gattegno’s Silent Way. His approach has been significantly enhanced over that period and can be applied in conjunction with non-Silent Way approaches to grammar etc, and with intermediate and advanced students.

We teach pronunciation using ‘listen and repeat’ exercises because that’s how it’s always been done, and because common sense seems to say that it should work even if it doesn’t.