Teaching Pronunciation to ESP Students and Assessing Their Phonological Competence

Анотація

The relevance of the study is determined by the need to develop engineering students’ phonological competence as an essential component of professional communicative competence in ESP instruction. In academic and professional communication, pronunciation difficulties may reduce intelligibility, affect the perception of technical terminology, and create obstacles during presentations, discussions, teamwork, and international academic interaction. The purpose of the study is to explore effective approaches to teaching and assessing pronunciation in ESP courses for engineering students, with particular attention to intelligibility, phonemic awareness, prosody, terminology pronunciation, native language interference, and the pedagogical potential of AI-assisted learning tools. The research methods include the analysis of recent scientific literature, comparative analysis of pronunciation teaching approaches, synthesis and generalization of methodological findings, and classroom observations conducted during ESP teaching practice at a technical university. The results of the study demonstrate that pronunciation instruction should be integrated systematically into ESP learning rather than limited to occasional correction or listening activities. Effective pronunciation training may gradually progress from individual sounds and terminology practice to phrase-level activities, sentence production, and professional oral communication tasks. The article identifies typical pronunciation difficulties faced by engineering students, including the distinction between vowel sounds and diphthongs, stress placement, clear articulation of final consonants, and the production of sounds absent in the native language. The findings also indicate that phonetic transcription may support the development of phonemic awareness, while AI-assisted learning tools and speech recognition technologies may create additional opportunities for autonomous practice, immediate feedback, and self-assessment. The conclusions indicate that pronunciation assessment in ESP instruction should primarily take into account speech intelligibility, prosody, accuracy of terminology pronunciation, and effectiveness of professional communication rather than closeness to native-like pronunciation.