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8 - Teaching for Intelligibility

Guidelines for Setting Priorities

from Part IV - Teaching and Research Approaches to Intelligibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2018

John M. Levis
Affiliation:
Iowa State University
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Summary

This chapter presents six principles to help decide whether a particular pronunciation problem is worth teaching. The principles are intended to begin to define what an intelligibility-based approach is like. The principles are sometimes ambiguous because no category of sounds is a priori either to be included or to be excluded in an intelligibility-based approach.  Each general category includes more and less important features.  There appears to be more important and less important consonant and vowel sounds, just as there appears to be more and less important elements of intonation or word stress. The guidelines are an explicit attempt to define parameters for informed intuition, an argument for a nuanced approach to priorities, and, hopefully, a way to have an impact upon classroom practice and help to use precious classroom time more effectively. The guidelines include prioritizing features that are explicitly connected to other areas of language use, that affect the ability to process speech, that privilege important lexical items, that carry a high functional load, that are more frequent, and that are easy to learn. Each of these principles is based both on research and informed intuition, and can help teachers to decide whether something is likely to be worth teaching.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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  • Teaching for Intelligibility
  • John M. Levis, Iowa State University
  • Book: Intelligibility, Oral Communication, and the Teaching of Pronunciation
  • Online publication: 24 September 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108241564.011
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  • Teaching for Intelligibility
  • John M. Levis, Iowa State University
  • Book: Intelligibility, Oral Communication, and the Teaching of Pronunciation
  • Online publication: 24 September 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108241564.011
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Teaching for Intelligibility
  • John M. Levis, Iowa State University
  • Book: Intelligibility, Oral Communication, and the Teaching of Pronunciation
  • Online publication: 24 September 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108241564.011
Available formats
×