How is Communicative Phonology different?
Other theories of phonology focus on describing learners’ speech and hypothesising rules or processes that could have created that ‘output’. Such rules are generally very complex. Worse still, they are not ‘accessible’ to conscious awareness, so even if teachers go to the trouble of learning them, it doesn’t help them help their students. Commmunicative Phonology focuses on helping teachers understand how learners think about speech, and use this understanding to communicate with learners about pronunciation in ways that actually help them change the way they speak.
