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.

This volume fills a gap by introducing readers to whole courses focused on teaching the pronunciation of English as a second, foreign, or international language. This collection is designed to support more effective pronunciation teaching in as many language classrooms in as many different parts of the world as possible and to serve as a core text in an ESOL teacher development course dedicated to preparing pronunciation teachers. 
 
Teaching the Pronunciation of English illustrates that pronunciation teaching is compatible with communicative, task-based, post-method, and technology-mediated approaches to language teaching.  This theme permeates the volume as a whole and is well represented in Chapters 3-12, which are dedicated to specialist-teachers’ firsthand depictions of pronunciation-centered courses.  Each of these ten chapters features a set of innovative teaching strategies and contemporary course design structures developed by the chapter contributor(s). 

To prepare readers to more fully appreciate the substance and quality of Chapters 3-12, the volume’s two initial chapters are more foundational.  Chapters 1 and 2 provide an overview of core topics language teachers need to know about to become pronunciation teachers:  the suprasegmentals (thought groups, prominence, word stress, intonation, and pitch jumps) and the English consonants and vowel sounds.