ИСТИНА

The status of the English language has changed over the last century. It has been labelled a global lingua franca. With the spread of the language, international requirements towards English learners’ pronunciation have also changed. After completing courses on practical and theoretical phonetics, English language teaching and linguistics majors are required to develop a very high level of professional pronunciation skills. This research presents an experiment which was aimed at identifying pronunciation inaccuracies on suprasegmental level among ELT majors. An experiment-based study performed among second and third year students(20 respondents) at Lomonosov Moscow State University was used to collect qualitative data which was further analysed. The results revealed that the weakest points of both groups of respondents’ performance were the melodics of speech and rhythm. Around 40% of second-year students mistakenly used the rising tone in all questions while 55% of third-year students used the rising tone in all statements. The results, however, cannot reflect the general trend, considering the limited number of respondents. The research concludes that it is necessary to develop a new elective course for the purposes of teaching practical phonetics to ELT majors during their senior year, which would prevent the loss of the acquired pronunciation skills.