Have you ever been in a situation in which you had to teach your student an English sound and he/she just couldn't make it?! Let's take as an example the one of the funniest Friends episode:
Yeah, I'm quite sure most of you have! :)
And these are the moments in which we find ourselves thinking if it is worth to insist on teaching pronunciation. The fact is that we just can't blame the complexity of the English phonemic system... Ok, it IS complex, BUT one has to take into consideration some other elements: the sex of the learner, the age of the speaker, the problems such learner might have in the speech organs, etc.
Sex may not be so decisive as to whether or not a person is able to produce this or that sound, though some researchers defend that firmly. The age influence is precisely the most focused point of discussion about pronunciation acquisition (take a look at Lund's paper about that) and most people believe that the sooner a person studies pronunciation (not only that, but a foreign language itself) the more successful he/she is going to be. And even more warning, we have the fact that our student might have problems concerning the speech organs, such a problem being the reason why he/she can't produce some sounds.
Besides all that has been discussed so far, we have to consider that some students just don't have listening accurancy sufficient to perceive some sounds. If we don't provide our students with an apropriate audio input (and this I mean all sort of it: music, movies, dialogues, etc) they won't develop the capacity of properly acquiring the sounds we teach.
Hence, you must be the first one to insist on pronunciation. Do it so that your students follow you!
