GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

Now comes the time to draw some conclusions . It is important to mention that I found necessary to pay a special attention to several aspects  concerning the “Ways  of  teaching  pronunciation in TEFL “ .

 The pronunciation process seems to be a practical one but it can not be practiced by anyone without being aware of some theoretical notions concerning pronunciation.

The first chapter contains information about the difficulties met in the process of teaching English pronunciation . This process is not easy at all and it needs to be studied first. A teacher should know first the level of the learner , then to find out which are the difficulties. A  very frequent difficulty is the difference between the English phonic system and the learners’ phonic system. In this case the teachers  and the learners as well must study the differences between the ways of pronouncing special sounds.

A speaker can have a wonderful grammar , a very well developed vocabulary , but he or she can be misunderstood by a native speaker or even by the teacher. We can ask what  is the problem? The answer to this question is that a bad pronunciation makes the speaker or the learner to make first of all a bad impression about himself or about herself , and secondly of course to be misunderstood .  

Also in this chapter I tried to show some micro skills and techniques used in the teaching pronunciation process. It is very important for a teacher to know what to teach , how to teach , when to teach and why to teach. It happens that the learners have no ideas why they need to be taught different things at different times and with different purposes. For example when I was at school practice I tried to see this thing at every lesson. Pupils were already intermediate learners I would say , it was the 9^th grade and practically they had a good pronunciation , but it was  not perfect , and it is normal , to my mind. I observed that they had a good teacher in English who knew all these things and in such a way they got good pronunciation .

In the second chapter I mentioned something about the sound system. A teacher should be aware of all the peculiarities of the English vowels and consonants. Without it students or learners can not receive a good  information about it and they are not able to become good teachers in their turn. For example if I did not receive this information when I was a beginner now I could never become a good teacher. The pronunciation process seems to be a practical one but it can not be practiced by anyone without being aware of some theoretical notions concerning pronunciation.

The third and the fourth chapters are practical ones. Everyone knows that theory without practice is nothing, and I agree with this. Practical part means exercises for different types of vowels ,consonants and diphthongs as well , different  activities for teaching or better to  say for practicing the English intonation ,word stress and sentence stress. This is one of the most important aspects in this process , I think. What I tried to do with the learners at school at this chapter was to practice with them intonation and word stress with the help of the tongue twisters.

Actually this is all that I could in this domain. There are  many other aspects in pronunciation I did not touch upon . My suggestion would be to pay also a special attention to such aspects as developing pronunciation through games , developing the process of learning pronunciation by studying the weak and the strong forms in a sentence. A learner should be aware which syllables to stress and in what cases. It is rather difficult to do it because , practically there are no rules for this. The learner should feel the stress exactly as the native speakers do.

In the end I would say , as a future teacher of English that a teacher must teach his students first of all the best pronunciation.