The importance of vowel length in pronunciation teaching

• Autores: Adam Brown
• Localización: ITL International Journal of Applied Linguistics, ISSN 0019-0810, ISSN-e 1783-1490, Nº. 145-146, 2004, págs. 269-288
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Teachers must decide which pronunciation features are important and merit attention, and concentrate on these in the limited time available. The approach of Abercrombie (1956), that concentrates on producing the maximum improvement with the minimum effort, is guided by the principle of achieving comfortable intelligibility - a major goal for most language learners. This view has been refined by Jenkins (2000), who examined the causes of breakdowns in communication between non-native speakers, and thus arrived at a lingua franca core. This specifies those features which account for such breakdowns, and are therefore considered to be undispensable in Non-native speakers' communication. One such feature is vowel length. The importance of this feature in communication and language teaching is discussed in this article.