How Well Do Elementary School English Textbooks Address Pronunciation?

This paper investigates how adequately pronunciation aspects are addressed in elementary school English textbooks, specifically focusing on how pronunciation is integrated into lessons and what pronunciation features are focused across the textbooks. This study also explores the extent to which teacher’s manuals provide linguistic and pedagogical information to support English pronunciation teaching. For these, five 3rd and 4th grade textbooks and teacher’s manuals developed according to the 2015 revised national curriculum were surveyed. The results of this study are as follows: Across the textbooks, pronunciation instruction is incorporated into lessons mostly in relation to sound-letter correspondences; pronunciation activities employ a limited repertoire of controlled techniques; the textbooks exhibit unexhaustive and unbalanced coverage of segmental and suprasegmental aspects; they are not effectively designed to teach pronunciation features which pose difficulties for Korean child learners of English; the teacher’s manuals provide neither sufficient and/or accurate linguistic explanations for pronunciation aspects nor principles and techniques for teaching them. Based on these findings, implications for materials development, pronunciation teaching, and teacher training are suggested.