Journal of Second Language Pronunciation 3:1 (2017), 1–8. doi 10.1075/jslp.3.1.001evi
issn 2215–1931 / e-issn 2215–194X © John Benjamins Publishing Company
Evidence-based pronunciation teaching
A pedagogy for the future
John M. Levis
Iowa State University
I have given a number of presentations during 2016, including talks to intensive
English program teachers, as part of psycholinguistics, pronunciation, and linguis-
tics conferences, and fnally in a corpus linguistics conference. A common theme
for me was the connection of research and teaching in second language pronun-
ciation, a topic I have discussed before in this journal (Levis, 2016). It remains a
central question in the feld of second language pronunciation, albeit one that has
not always been addressed well. On the teaching side, L2 pronunciation teaching
and materials development are full of talented crafspeople who bring divergent,
yet under-researched approaches to teaching, and who may show little knowledge
of research fndings. On the research side, research articles are ofen written with
pedagogical implications that no one applies. Te result is that the puzzle pieces
that connect research and practice remain too few to see a fuller picture of what
works, why it works, and in what situations it works.
In some other felds, evidence-based practice has been touted as a way to
move forward. Evidence-based practice (EBP), whose roots extend back to the
19th century, became well-known in medicine in the 1990s, and was defned as
“the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence about the
care of individual patients” (Sackett, 1997, p. 3). Evidence-based practices spread
beyond medicine to other felds such as audiology, speech/language pathology,
and education, all of which are relevant to pronunciation teaching. EBP, rather
than calling for a direct application of research to practice (and thus privileging
research over practice), is based on three sources of evidence: External scientifc
evidence (i.e., research), clinical expertise and/or expert opinion, and the views
of clients about what works (http://www.asha.org/Research/EBP/Introduction-to-
Evidence-Based-Practice/). Such a framework is well-suited to second language
pronunciation teaching, which is in need of robust evidence drawn from all three