Teachers’ Views on Teaching English Pronunciation : A Phenomenographic Study of Upper-secondary Teachers’ Views and Reported Practices

Sammanfattning: This study investigates Swedish upper-secondary teachers’ views and reported practices regarding pronunciation instruction in the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom. It adopts a mixed-method design, analysing qualitative data collected from a focus-group interview (N=4) and quantitative data collected from an online survey (N=54).  To investigate the views and reported practices of teachers, the following research questions were posed:  1. What are the views and attitudes of English teachers in the Swedish upper-secondary school regarding pronunciation and pronunciation instruction?  2. How do English teachers in the Swedish upper-secondary school describe their own practices in pronunciation instruction?  Results indicate that teachers generally value comprehensibility as the most important aim of pronunciation instruction. However, a native-like accent still seems to be highly valued, and nativeness norms still seem to affect teachers’ views and practices to some extent. Finally, our findings indicate that teachers spend very little time on pronunciation teaching in general, and they highlight that other aspects of language instruction are more important.