Pronouncing English is a textbook for teaching English phonetics and phonology, offering an original "stress-based" approach while incorporating all the standard course topics. Drawing on current linguistic theory, it uniquely analyzes prosody first, and then discusses its effects on pronunciation—emphasizing suprasegmental features such as meter, stress, and intonation, then the vowels and consonants themselves.
Distinguished by being the first work of its kind to be based on an exhaustive statistical analysis of all the lexical entries of an entire dictionary, Pronouncing English is complemented by a list of symbols and a glossary. Richard Teschner and M. Stanley Whitley present an improved description of English pronunciation and conclude each chapter with suggestions on how to do a better job of teaching it. An appendix with a brief introduction to acoustic phonetics—the basis for the perception vs. the production of sounds—is also included. Revolutionary in its field, Pronouncing English declares that virtually all aspects of English pronunciation—from the vowel system to the articulation of syllables, words, and sentences—are determined by the presence or absence of stress.
The accompanying CD-ROM carries audio recordings of many of the volume's exercises, more than 100 text and sound files, and data files on which the statistical observations were based.
This volume was conceived as a "best practices" resource for pronunciation and speaking teachers in the way that Vocabulary Myths by Keith S. Folse is one for reading and vocabulary teachers. Like others in the Myths series, this book combines research with good pedagogical practices.
The book opens with a Prologue by Linda Grant (author of the Well Said textbook series), which reviews the last four decades of pronunciation teaching, the differences between accent and intelligibility, the rudiments of the English sound system, and other factors related to the ways that pronunciation is learned and taught.
The myths challenged in this book are:
§ Once you’ve been speaking a second language for years, it’s too late to change your pronunciation. (Derwing and Munro)
§ Pronunciation instruction is not appropriate for beginning-level learners. (Zielinski and Yates)
§ Pronunciation teaching has to establish in the minds of language learners a set of distinct consonant and vowel sounds. (Field)
§ Intonation is hard to teach. (Gilbert)
§ Students would make better progress if they just practiced more. (Grant)
§ Accent reduction and pronunciation instruction are the same thing. (Thomson)
§ Teacher training programs provide adequate preparation in how to teach pronunciation (Murphy).
The book concludes with an Epilogue by Donna M. Brinton, who synthesizes some of the best practices explored in the volume.
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