Empowering Students with Predictive Skills

Source: J. Morley (ed.), Pronunciation Pedagogy and Theory: New Views, New Directions (Alexandria, VA: TESOL, 1994), pp. 17–35. One of the trends to sweep over ESL instruction in the past few years has been the effort to “empower” students, meaning in part to give them the resources they need to become lifelong language learners after their classes are finished. Teaching to empower students is now more common elsewhere in ESL curricula than it is in the area of pronunciation. Yet the need for students to continue improving the clarity of their oral language after course work ends is real and pressing. For this reason, empowerment should be a dimension of instruction in pronunciation as much as in any other part of an ESL program.