Teaching pronunciation effectively in an EFL classroom; a literature review

Sammanfattning: This study provides a literature review of the most effective ways to teach pronunciation to EFL secondary school students in Sweden. There is limited time allocated to pronunciation leading to a scarcity of available effective methods. This impacts the important role which intelligibility holds in pronunciation. Therefore, the objective of this review centres around finding the most effective ways to teach pronunciation in a Swedish EFL secondary school classroom, considering a variety of approaches. A selection of electronic databases were used consisting of specific search terms and limitations, concentrating on English language pronunciation. This resulted in eight articles, all of which experimented on finding ways to teach pronunciation. These studies are different in their methods and objectives, studies all lead to different results which we categorised into three themes: computer-assisted learning, social network learning and unconventional learning. Although all studies reported positive outcomes, only two were proven to be the most effective for this context. The results indicate that computer-assisted learning in combination with a teacher is the most effective way to teach pronunciation to EFL learners. This aligns with both the Swedish curriculum and two educational theories formulated by Krashen and Vygotsky. Our findings demonstrate an opportunity to implement this combination into the Swedish school context and allow for future research projects on pronunciation.