This article presents an experiment which was aimed at determining the English Language Teaching (ELT) majors’ views on the pronunciation of a competent English teacher. The relationship among intelligibility, comprehensibility and competence was explored in order to evaluate the necessity and possibility of updating the recommendations for teaching practical phonetics as a consequence of the spread of English as a lingua franca. A questionnaire and a semi-structured interview were used in order to collect quantitative and qualitative data respectively. The results revealed that English teachers who followed the Lingua Franca Core (LFC) were judged as significantly more intelligible and comprehensible to Russian ELT majors. This result proves the efficiency of LFC-based instruction if the goal is intelligibility. Native-sounding English teachers were rated as significantly more professionally competent despite their low intelligibility and comprehensibility, which supports the native-speaker bias previously described in scientific literature. The authors conclude that it is necessary to develop a new pronunciation model for the purposes of teaching phonetics to ELT majors, which would satisfy both their needs and desires by combining the LFC basis indispensable for intelligibility, with the features of native-speaker pronunciation, linked to the image of a competent professional.

The article explores the existing linguo-didactic terms “phonetic competence”, “phonological competence”, “phonetic-phonological competence” in Russian scientific literature and defines the phenomenon within this work. The authors draw a line between phonological competence development in university students of linguistic and non-linguistic majors, as well as between productive and receptive phonological skills development considering the status of English as a lingua franca. The article reviews the main parameters of phonological competence assessment outlined in academic literature – intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness – in diachrony in order to define their relationship and suggest their translations for using in the Russian academic literature.