Native-like pronunciation as the goal?

Many people who are pretty confident when reading and writing in English become suddenly incredibly shy and insecure when they have to speak it. Of course, people's level of proficiency can differ in each of the basic language skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking). But how come they lose all confidence? For some people, the origin of their insecurities is not speaking in the language as such, but their pronunciation.

To be fair, at least in my experience as a student, pronunciation is either completely ignored or we are taught that we should try to sound as native-like as possible. But if sounding "native" is the goal... native from where? There are many countries that speak English as their first language, and many others that have it as their official language, and they are all *so* different form one another! In linguistics, this is referred to as the World Englishes (if you're interested, check out this video of David Crystal).

Thankfully, there has been a shift in the focus of English learning towards a communicative approach that emphasises intelligibility as a goal (Murphy, 2014).

So, one thing that one should be clear is that, in fact, you do NOT need to sound like a native speaker. Your goal as a foreign language student should be to be understood, since your goal is successful communication in an international environment (as a lingua franca). That is, of course, unless you do want to sound like a native speaker of a certain place. Then, by all means, work on it, I'm sure you can achieve that! 😉

In my next post I'll talk about how you can improve your pronunciation so as to avoid miscommunication and to gain confidence (and maybe even have fun while doing it!).

References

Murphy, J. M. (2014). Intelligible, comprehensible, non-native models in ESL/EFL pronunciation teaching. System, 42(1), 258–269. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.SYSTEM.2013.12.007