English Pronunciation in Use Elementary

auto-review by the author, Jonathan Marks, Poland

English Pronunciation in Use Elementary was published by CUP in 2007, along with its companions at Intermediate level by Mark Hancock and Advanced level by Martin Hewings. (You'll see that all three authors have either a first name or a surname beginning with Mar-.) It's billed as being for 'self-study and classroom use', and the self-study angle was one of the biggest challenges I faced in writing it. When this sort of material is used without the mediation and facilitation of a teacher, a lot depends on: 1 a learner's capacity to apprehend what they hear on the recordings and find a way to emulate it using their own speech production system, and 2 their ability to process and act on explanations presented in words and/or diagramatically. Neither of these faculties can be relied on. So I tried: 1 to script short, accessible chunks, ranging from individual sounds and words to short dialogues and narratives, that would: a. highlight particular features of pronunciation unambiguously b. contextualise these features in realistic, memor(is)able, short stretches of English 2 to make verbal explanations, and diagrams of the production of sounds, as simple and clear and helpful as I could, using a minimum of technical terminology. Ideally, but of course impossibly, I would have wanted separate editions in innumerable languages, so as to be able to give fuller guidance, and also to make contrastive reference to other languages, which I think is particularly important in the case of pronunciation. Realistically, I'd say the level required for using the material in self-study mode is probably something like 'upper elementary', or at least 'enthusiastic elementary'. There are 50 two-page units. As in the other CUP In Use titles, the left-hand page introduces a particular topic and the corresponding right-hand page provides practice activities. Section A is about how to say and spell individual sounds and sound sequences. The units on sounds generally introduce two sounds each, paired on the basis of similarity of spelling and/or similarity of articulation, and overall potential for confusion. Sounds are embodied in words, sentences and mini-texts constructed from high-frequency vocabulary and simple grammar which are likely to be familiar to learners at elementary level. The most frequent spellings of each sound are given, highlighted through differential use of colour in high-frequency example words. I felt this was important because I think spelling is a major cause of interference and uncertainty with pronunciation. In most cases there's a generalisation such as "/i:/ is usually spelled ee or ea" with examples, plus common exceptions; for /i:/ these include words with ie, e, i and the individual words key and people. The sounds that are focused on in each unit are scripted to appear mostly in prominent syllables, where they are most salient and where accuracy of pronunciation is most important. For example, in one of the examples illustrating the sound /3:/ 'When would you prefer, Tuesday or Thursday?', the syllables fer and Thurs are the tonic prominences of their respective tone units. Even in a more minimal example like 'fruit juice', the two instances of /u:/ inhabit the two prominent syllables in the tone unit. In this way, aspects of tone unit structure, rhythm and intonation run through all the material as a kind of hidden agenda, even where the ostensible focus is on individual phonemes. One sound that doesn't feature in Section A is the schwa, which is treated as a feature of unstressed syllables rather than a sound with the same status as the other vowel phonemes. Section A includes four units on consonant clusters, covering all possible two-term and three-term clusters in medial, initial and final positions, and consonant sequences across word boundaries. In working through these units a learner might discover, for instance, that they can easily pronounce the cluster /sk/ at the ends of words but not at the beginning. The exercise types in Section A include such things as allocating words to categories on the basis of pronunciation, finding the odd one out, finding words that rhyme, decoding phonemic transcriptions of words, putting words into sentences and dialogues, matching halves of sentences and so on. Some exercises focus purely on pronunciation, but in most of them learners also need to think about what makes sense in context, sometimes with reference to picture prompts. In doing the exercises they work on their pronunciation and listening, but also on their English in general, practising useful vocabulary, grammar and phraseology. There are also some short texts that I - perhaps rather ambitiously - call 'poems'. They certainly aren't intended to be literary masterpieces, but rather to provide high-density contextualised exemplification of pronunciation features, which learners might feel motivated to recite and possibly learn by heart. Section B deals with syllables, strong vs. weak syllables and stress patterns in simple and compound words. Section C works on phrases and sentences, including pausing, rhythm, strong and weak forms and various kinds of linking between words, and highlights links between pronunciation and grammar such as -s and -ed endings, articles, comparatives and the use of auxiliary verbs. Section D focuses on intonation in lexical phrases, dialogues, stories and conversation. It introduces some typical uses of intonation in contrasting given and new information, in mirroring the discoursal use of the past continuous and past simple in narrative, and in helping with discourse management, expressiveness and interpersonal aims in conversation. Section E is a reference section which includes a chart of phonemic symbols with example words, a guide for speakers of 20-odd languages, extra practice in distinguishing between pairs of sounds, a summary of the most common ways in which letters and sequences of letters are pronounced, and exercises in pronouncing the letters of the alphabet, numbers and geographical names. There's a Key to all the exercises, and the whole material is recorded on a set of five CDs. The recordings include a bit of moderate accent variety, including some non-native voices. Sub-sections in the book labelled 'Important for listening' highlight significant differences between British and American pronunciation, and between northern and southern English accents. There's also a separate CD-ROM with further exercises and games. The text includes quite a number of drawings, some of which are integral parts of the exercises and some of which are just for fun, really; there were originally going to be more of these, but in the end there wasn't room for them. In Use is the generic title of the series, of course, but it's more than that. I like to think that the English Pronunciation in Use Elementary course will show learners the usefulness of working on pronunciation in developing their speaking and listening skills in English. I hope they'll feel, after using the course, that it's helped them not only with their pronunciation (fall-rise) but with their English (fall).

Please check the Pronunciation course at Pilgrims website.