The British Council advocates learning and teaching English phonemic symbols to "help your own and your students' pronunciation."
See https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/phonemic-symbols.
It's certainly an interesting area of study. But we don't do a good enough job of teaching the English basics. They don't even teach diagramming anymore. Learning spelling has taken a back seat to the "whole language" approach that produces a lot of smart high school graduates who can't spell:
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Wiki
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Whole language versus phonics
And spelling is bad:
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A bad spell
Meanwhile, American students aren't learning the basics of grammar. Your grammar is better than most U.S. high school graduates'.
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Bad grammar ain't good
The most important skill taught in English class is probably reading comprehension. It would be good to see more time dedicated to that, too:
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Huh?
And if you can't read well, you can't read Shakespeare. Does that matter? I think so, because it stretches your brain, feeds your soul, and acquaints you with a cornerstone of our dominant culture. But many disagree. There's a movement to banish Shakespeare (and a lot of other literature that matters) from the classroom:
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Kill Bill
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Pro and con
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Save Bill
Compared to all that (at least in the U.S., and I suspect elsewhere), pronunciation just isn't that important. I'm as guilty as the other folks here of talking about "standard" American English pronunciation, but really, there's almost no such thing. Ask a dozen Americans to say "Where's the water reservoir?" and you'll hear a dozen different ways of saying it, all of which are affected by each person's location, ethnicity, age, and class.
You might have noticed (even in this very thread) that Mike from New York and I often disagree on American English pronunciations. Mike has excellent English and gives great advice throughout this site. And I don't think my English is bad, either. But his way of talking is probably very New York, and though I've lived in New York, mine isn't, because I didn't learn to talk there. So the way I speak (and
hear) English is different. Neither of us is wrong. We just come from different language environments.
Even on the most crass commercial level, employers care about spelling and grammar. They do not care about pronunciation.
So if public education could just get people to agree on grammar and spelling and pick up a book or a newspaper now and then, it would be working miracles.
Don't misunderstand me. I have no quarrel with phonetic symbols! But with too few hours already dedicated to spelling, grammar, reading comprehension, and literature, adding pronunciation - a topic that's interesting to some but not vital for many - doesn't seem like good pedagogy. Instead, let's teach phonetic symbols to the college students who are actually likely to use them - for instance, to teach English to non-English-speaking people who want to learn how.