Investigating the Effectiveness of Pronunciation Teaching and Learning in the Algerian Secondary School

Abstract

English has become increasingly the vehicle language used for communication across the globe. This fact has led to an increase in its demand and a need to its acquisition and teaching in our schools. It is virtually certain that the main pre-requisite of mastering the language is to speak accurately and fluently. However, our classrooms still emphasize on writing and reading at the expense of speaking skills, more precisely, pronunciation which is an essential competence to carry on any oral communication regardless the grammar and vocabulary bank. This fact has been noticed with reference to the neglection of its teaching and evaluation in the Algerian curriculum. Therefore, it represents a challenge for both EFL teachers and learners who display many limitations as they perform oral communication. The current study is conducted with first-year students at the secondary level. It tends to explore the main causes and factors that determine the difficulties of pupils’ oral proficiency and to find out the remedial strategies to promote pronunciation teaching and learning. Furthermore, this dissertation is divided into two main parts: the theoretical part or the literature review and the practical part or the pilot study, each one includes two interrelated chapters. The main results obtained from the study are certain views about the neglection of pronunciation though the approach is supposed to encourage oral communication. Also, it showed that both students and teachers are unmotivated due to the difficulty of the general negativity, shallowness and boredom surrounding those few pronunciation in the textbook.