Abstract:
Abstract
Language teachers’ knowledge of pronunciation pedagogy affects their classroom practice. The study sought to find
out language approaches used to teach pronunciation and to establish how teachers’ mastery of pronunciation
facilitate the acquisition of sounds by learners. The findings revealed that teachers of English had challenges when
teaching pronunciation hindering mastery of English sounds by learners. Some of their pronunciation was not
comprehensible distorting meaning. They used imitation, phonetic transcriptions, minimal pair drills and sentence
drills to teach pronunciation. It was established that some of them had pronunciation difficulties affecting the
intelligibility or comprehensibility of what they were communicating about. Learners do not have to achieve native
like pronunciation but they should surpass the threshold level to ensure that their pronunciation does not distort the
meaning of what they communicate. When a teacher who is meant to be a role model and source of input for learners
uses incomprehensible pronunciation distorting meaning, it is a significant setback to English Language Teaching
(ELT). There is need to reassess policies concerning who should be trained to teach English as a Second Language.
Keywords: pronunciation pedagogy, intelligibility issues, language acquisition, English Language Teaching
