The CATESOL Journal

The most common type of pronunciation exercises found in current ESL textbooks are those that focus on the voicing variation of past tense endings, /t/ and /d/, and the voicing variation of plural nouns and third-person singular verb endings, /s/ and /z/. While these voicing variations are a reality in English, knowing about them and practicing them do not help ESL students improve their pronunciation. The following article provides both linguistic and pedagogical arguments for excluding such exercises from ESL curricula because such exercises have a tendency to confound students, who often are already overwhelmed with the quantity of information they must master in the target language, and instructors who may have minimal training in the phonology of English and in the teaching of pronunciation.