Perfect English?

[Inma Alcázar]

For more than two decades academics and publishers have propounded theories on pronunciation acquisition and training since in a global world, communicating properly with other people from all over the world has become a must. The communicative approach is a product of the dissatisfaction of educators and linguists with the audiolingual and grammar-translation methods since these methods are not useful for learning the whole language, the real one. With the communicative approach students learn to communicate in nearly real situations, or through games and other communicative learning activities in lower levels such as dramatizacion, singing songs, tongue twisters... Everything sounds great, but when you put this approach into practice there are some problems. One problem is, how and when to correct our students mistakes? What mistakes should be corrected? If we correct all our students mistakes, we run the risk of our students do not want to speak anymore. What is more important: preserving the communicative process of the interaction or providing corrective feedback? These are difficult questions which depends on many different consideractions related to the learner. Besides, I wonder how perfect pronunciation sounds like. Does it mean that the persons sounds like a native speaker? If the answer is affirmative, what kind of speaker: American, British, Australian, South African? What is more important: speaking like a native who makes grammar mistakes, inarticulate some sounds and make themselves hard to understand or a non-native speaker who has a lack of vocabulary but can express his/ her ideas in a clear way? Is there a 'perfect' pronunciation in any language all around the world?