Challenges of Teaching Pronunciation at the Tertiary Level in Bangladesh

Abstract

Importance of pronunciation cannot be denied as receptive and productive skills like listening and speaking heavily depend on intelligible pronunciation. However, pronunciation hardly receives adequate importance in teaching and learning English at any level in Bangladesh. The EFL teachers of Bangladesh in some cases tend to be not willing to teach pronunciation. Khan (2007) mentions that most of the EFL teachers of Bangladesh do not know what strategies are appropriate to teach pronunciation. As a result they simply avoid teaching pronunciation. The major reason behind the negligence of teaching pronunciation is that the correlated sub-skills of pronunciation like listening and speaking also get very little emphasis in the syllabus and curriculum (Jahan, 2008). This paper, therefore, aims to explore the challenges of teaching English pronunciation at tertiary level in Bangladesh. The purpose of this study is to find out the extent to which English pronunciation is taught at tertiary level and what main challenges of teaching pronunciation are there in private universities of Bangladesh.