INVESTIGATION OF ESL TEACHER’S BELIEFS ABOUT PRONUNCIATION INSTRUCTION

Abstract

The cognitive dimensions of how language teachers’ beliefs influence the nature of their classroom instructions has been given a lot of attention by the researchers over the past few decades. These studies have provided insights into how teachers’ beliefs play an important role in helping teachers to make sense of the decisions they make in the classroom (Borg, 2006). However, these studies have only examined teachers’ beliefs in most of the second language skills, mainly reading, writing and grammar except for the pronunciation skill. Pronunciation skill from the aspect of teachers’ beliefs is underexplored considering the important role it plays in achieving successful communication. This paper reports part of a larger study on the results of a case study exploring 5 ESL teachers’ beliefs and their pronunciation instructional practices in the Malaysian secondary school context. They were interviewed and their ESL classrooms were observed. The discussion in this report focuses on the teachers’ beliefs of their roles in the classroom and their focused areas in teaching pronunciation. The findings accentuate some negative consistencies between their beliefs and their actual classroom practices. In addition, this study found that the teachers’ avoidance of pronunciation instructions was due to their limited knowledge on the pedagogical aspects.