Helping teachers help students with pronunciation: A cognitive approach

This article introduces a theoretical framework for understanding speech and pronunciation based on insights from cognitive phonology in which pronunciation is seen as a cognitive skill. In learning a cognitive skill, practice is essential, but its value depends on students having the right concept of what it is they are practising. Helping students form concepts appropriate to the new language is therefore a crucial part of a language teacher’s role. The article starts with an informal overview of the role of concepts and concept formation in cognition. I then consider how well-known observations about pronunciation and pronunciation learning can be understood from this perspective, and suggest some principles which can account for and extend these observations. Finally, I compare the cognitive approach with more familiar mainstream views of phonology, and suggest that they are not in conflict but offer significantly and usefully different perspectives appropriate to different applications.