Function-Based Material for Teaching Pronunciation

Traditional method of teaching pronunciation relies heavily on the bottom-up approaches which typically involve students repeating the models of speech sounds, followed by an extensive practice on the individual speech sounds. In other words, the traditional teaching is characterized by an attempt to build students’ articulatory competence. In this paper, the writer will propose a function-based model for teaching pronunciation in which one speech sound can be developed to cover seven language functions. The proposal for teaching pronunciation presented in this paper has been shown to be beneficial in helping learners acquire the English speech sounds in a more realistic and authentic manner.