Glossary audiolingual teaching

The importance of pronunciation for beginners
TEACHING BEGINNERS
It is particularly important to include effective pronunciation tuition in beginners’ language lessons, as this gets them off to a very good start in their general language acquisition, and minimizes the risk of ‘fossilization’, or stabilization of pronunciation habits, that make ESL speakers difficult for native speakers to understand.
It is well known that a learner with fairly good pronunciation, even if only at the word level, can be quite comprehensible to English speakers even with a fairly high level of grammatical errors, while someone with excellent grammar can be incomprehensible if key words are pronounced incorrectly. Giving learners a good basis in pronunciation as a normal part of their tuition in speaking and listening therefore opens up many more opportunities to them for conversation outside the classroom, which is the key to ongoing learning of all aspects of language, including grammar and pronunciation.
A good grounding in basic pronunciation is a valuable gift that any ESL teacher can give to any learner.
Advantages and disadvantages of teaching beginners
Teaching beginners has some particular difficulties associated with it:
it is more difficult for teachers to communicate with beginners in English about pronunciation, due to their low English language skills;
beginners often have limited opportunities to interact with native speakers outside class.
On the other hand, it has some important advantages, as we will discuss further when we deal with more advanced learners:
in classroom teaching, the group of learners is usually at roughly the same level (whereas more advanced learners can be very variable in the degree to which they have mastered pronunciation)
there is less ‘unlearning’ for them to do, both in terms of the way they pronounce English, and in terms of negative expectations about their inability to learn pronunciation
beginners are generally expecting, and expected, to have specific times devoted to pronunciation, which means that time can be scheduled for more intensive work to be done with them.
The ability to use what learners actually say, there and then, to create a mini-lesson on pronunciation in the midst of other work certainly requires a great deal of confidence and flexibility on the part of teachers, but is extremely effective – sometimes more so than spending a whole hour on pronunciation alone.