The Book of Pronunciation

Jonathan Marks, Poland, and Tim Bowen, UK

Authors: Jonathan Marks and Tim Bowen
Publisher: DELTA Publishing
Publication date: October 11th
Format: Book with CD
ISBN: 978 1 905085 70 5
Price: £23.95

Can you imagine a lesson that doesn't have any pronunciation in it?

Let's try .....

First attempt: A lecture by the teacher or an invited guest.

Well, even if the learners in the class aren't given any opportunity to ask questions or otherwise interact with the speaker, they can only follow the lecture by making connections between the sound of the speaker's voice and the English they know. This entails such things as:

1. recognising boundaries between words, although there might not be audible gaps between them
2. recognising familiar words, although they may be distorted by elision and assimilation
3. recognising how the speaker uses pausing, stress and intonation to mark units of information and key points in the lecture
4. (if the speaker is someone unfamiliar to them) recognising in what ways the speaker's accent differs from their own, or their teacher's, or other people's

So even if they aren't speaking, they're nevertheless drawing on their receptive awareness of pronunciation as a basis for making sense of what they're hearing. Some of them might also subvocalise, or repeat in a mumble, certain stretches of speech they hear from the speaker, perhaps imitating the speaker's accent, rhythm, intonation etc.

Second attempt: An essay-writing test.

While they're writing, or thinking what to write, some learners, at least, will probably:

1. look into the air and try out words, phrases, sentences that they might use, by silently producing them and judging whether or not they sound right
2. look at stretches of text they've written, and either mumble them to themselves or hear them in their imagination, to find out whether they'll do, or whether they need to be improved

So it turns out that even a lesson devoid of learner speaking - or of anybody speaking! - isn't a lesson devoid of pronunciation.

In the vast majority of lessons, though, learners do get some opportunity to speak, and it's pretty obvious that no one can speak without pronouncing - try it! It's also pretty obvious that pronunciation can be an immediate, and insurmountable, barrier to communication, even between people whose knowledge of English in general is good, and who would have no trouble communicating with each other in writing.

When learners are asked about their priorities, pronunciation is one thing that often comes up, not least because it's an important contributor to confidence in speaking an unfamiliar language.

But a lot of teachers tend to shy away from dealing with pronunciation.

Why?

Well, for one thing, it's tended to get sidelined in recent decades, in coursebooks and teacher training. For another, it's gained the reputation of being difficult - not just for learners, but for teachers, too. (These two reasons are, of course, not unconnected.)

The ability to teach pronunciation effectively certainly does require a considerable amount of knowledge and awareness, and The Book of Pronunciation presents (in Part A) essential knowledge in an accessible way, so that teachers will be able to work through it and develop their understanding and awareness and then, subsequently, use it as a reference.

Part B of The Book of Pronunciation - the bulk of the book - consists of over a hundred activities which teachers can use with their classes to work on sounds, sounds in sequence, pronunciation and spelling, word stress, features of connected speech, rhythm and intonation. Some of the activities are to develop learners' own production of English, while others are primarily receptive - to give help with features of pronunciation that can conspire to make listening difficult.

Part C, finally, contains material and tasks designed to develop teachers' awareness of:

1. pronunciation, for their own interest
2. their learners' pronunciation, as a basis for setting priorities for pronunciation work
3. how a pronunciation focus can be effectively integrated into any lesson, whenever it's needed

Whether you like it or not, pronunciation won't go away. We hope that The Book of Pronunciation will inform and inspire you, and help to make the process of teaching and learning pronunciation effective and enjoyable for you and your classes.