The importance of Pronunciation?

[sivvy]

Hi All,

I have been thinking about this question a lot lately - why do we need to learn/teach pronunciation? I'd like some opinions, other than my own!

Cheers.

[Tdol]

Without some degree of acuracy, learners could end up producing unrecognisable or incomprehensible language. I don't think we need to try to turn people into sounding like native speakers, but we do need to get them to be capable of being understood by a variety of listeners, which involves a degree of approximation to the core sounds.

[navvee532]

But there is no agreed upon standard for pronunciation and it varies with the location where you speak .