This volume is a potpourri of articles written mostly by Polish scholars (all but four authors are from Polish universities; the others are from universities in Croatia, Slovenia, and England). Because of the shear number of articles (24), space limitations preclude my providing more than a brief summary and comments.

This collection has no introduction or preface; the only clue to the contents and focus of this work is on the back cover, which states that it contains contributions from those involved in teaching pronunciation and those more concerned with theoretical phonetics and phonology. The book is organized in three sections: “Accents,” “Speech,” and “Applications.”

The first section, “Accents,” contains articles about British accents and purports to discuss the issue of which accent to use as the reference accent in teaching. It includes papers on Received Pronuncation (RP; Wells), students' awareness of the sociosymbolic values of RP (Ozga & Mańkowska), Estuary English (Przedlacka), yod-palatalization (Głowacka), free variation analyzed in an Optimality Theory framework (Ostalski), and t-glottalization in teenage speech (Przedlacka). Except for a few passing remarks, in none of the articles was I was able to find any discussion of the issue of which variety to use in teaching pronunciation. The result is that this section serves mainly to raise the awareness of teachers and teacher trainers of the fact that a great deal of variation exists in British English (if they did not know that already) and of the fact that selecting a reference accent is no easy task.

The second section, “Speech,” is claimed to address the context for teaching phonetics and phonology as well as teacher training with an emphasis on awareness raising. Articles include arguments promoting the teaching of phonology (Szpyra), including formal teaching of pronunciation and “conscious competence” (Dziubalska-Kołaczyk), an assessment of the quality of expertise prospective teachers derive from training (Majer), and three separate studies reporting the results of surveys on attitudes and practices in teaching pronunciation (Majer, Sobkowiak, and Waniek-Klimczaki). This section would seem to be of interest primarily to those teaching in Poland but probably would not have much general appeal.

The third section, “Applications,” contains 12 articles (although some are as short as five pages). This part purportedly includes studies on interlanguage phonetics and phonology, speech processing, and pronunciation teaching. Such a description forewarns the reader that there could be no unifying theme to this section, and the articles themselves prove this to be the case. Roach's short article claiming that rhythm and timing are important in successful communication presents an idea that is hardly original or controversial. The same criticism can be leveled at Petek's article, which promotes the use of computer-assisted teaching and argues that near-native pronunciation might not be teachable. The other articles cover a variety of topics: a study of Croatian English prosody (Josipović), intonation patterns in turn-taking (B Ý|AkÞaczkowska), stress placement by Polish learners of English (Waniek-Kimczak), the influence of regional variation in Polish on obstruent voicing in English (Lew), reflections on the teaching of pronunciation in Polish primary and secondary schools (Defty, Nowak, & Peitrzak), micro-narratives in face-to-face interaction (Mamul), perception of English obstruents (Deska), a general description of connectionism (BÝpolishaÞczkowska), sensory modality preferences (Baran), and a phonological analysis of an aphasic child (Ciepiela).

This volume would seem to have more appeal to Polish teachers and researchers than to the international community. There does not seem to be any unifying theme to this work, other than the general topics of phonology and pronunciation. Although the topics are largely limited to the Polish context, it is perhaps more important to note that, with few exceptions, the authors did not fit their studies into the larger context of current research in SLA or pronunciation teaching (e.g., one article had no references at all and several others had fewer than half a dozen references). Additionally, there is also a lack of rigor (e.g., the quantitative studies did not use statistics), originality (e.g., three articles were based on surveys on attitudes and practices in teaching pronunciation), and general appeal (e.g., one article contained reflections on the curricula and teaching in Polish primary and secondary schools). It is doubtful that many of these articles could appear in international refereed journals. There was also a lack of careful editing, evidenced by the inclusion of anecdotal and mundane information, such as Baran's footnote stating that pronunciation includes not only sounds but suprasegmentals as well, which are “the most crucial component of intelligible speech” (p. 316). This collection of articles, therefore, has limited general appeal.