Positioning Suprasegmental Instruction in TESOL Pronunciation Pedagogy: An Educational Review

Abstract

Pronunciation instruction is crucial for communicative competence as one aspect in TESOL. However, the instruction coverage of its various phonological features tends to be uneven. This narrative review investigates how suprasegmental features are conceptualised and located within pronunciation research oriented towards TESOL, and does so with the education lens that treats studies as a reflection of pedagogical priorities rather than indicators of research trends. Fourteen peer-reviewed studies published between 2010-2024 and addressing pronunciation instruction or assessment within TESOL, ESL, and EFL contexts, were studied qualitatively to examine the framing, instructional focus and assessment of segmental and suprasegmental features. It shows that there is essentially a uniform pattern in the corpus: suprasegmental factors like stress, rhythm, and intonation are admittedly acknowledged to be important for intelligibility, fluency, and communicative efficacy, and yet they are rarely treated as stable, central instructional targets; instead, suprasegmentals tend to be woven into wider constructs like fluency or comprehensibility, or even treated as secondary to segmental instruction. This seems to be caused less by pedagogical resistance than by structural and institutional factors, including assessment practices, especially preparation of teachers, and methodological histories that might elevate discrete and measurable phonological units. The review ends with a call for more alignment between principles of communicative pronunciation and their realization in teaching-in particular, pedagogical sequencing and open incorporation of suprasegmental instruction into TESOL.