Second and foreign language pronunciation teaching in Finland – steps towards systematic teaching and assessment

This presentation will give an overview of second and foreign language pronunciation teaching in Finland, focusing on recent developments. Even though teaching materials used in Finnish primary and secondary-level education are of high quality and include a variety of materials for pronunciation, overall, the teaching relies on traditional methods such as listen and repeat, and concentrates on individual sounds (Tergujeff 2013). Pronunciation is poorly present in curricula across levels of education. However, educational administrators have shown interest towards bringing forth pronunciation; for the first time, pronunciation is now included in the criteria used for language proficiency assessment at primary and secondary level. In addition, support materials for pronunciation teaching are provided as part of the national core curriculum for basic education.

Researchers and teacher trainers have a central role in developing pronunciation teaching. Finnish universities have traditionally focused on developing the future language teachers' own pronunciation, because a vast majority of teachers are not L1 speakers of the language they teach. As a new development, courses have been designed to address how to teach pronunciation. These have been popular among students, who generally understand the importance of pronunciation and long for training in this area. In the presentation, I will argue that the status of this neglected area of language teaching can easily be raised by making use of students' enthusiasm to learn about and to do research on pronunciation learning and teaching. I will also discuss the importance of making pronunciation research visible for the greater audience.

Reference

Tergujeff, E. 2013. English Pronunciation Teaching in Finland. Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities 207. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä.