Clear Speech attempts to help students improve their pronunciation and listening skills by exposing them to different features of the pronunciation of North American English, such as linking sounds, vowel lengthening and pitch change, but particularly stress. The book emphasizes the importance of stress in oral production and how easy it is, especially for non-native speakers, to misplace the stress in a word or sentence and thus cause confusion or misunderstanding in communication. The author sets out to achieve her goal by providing real life, useful examples to illustrate the ‘musical signals of spoken English' (p. ix), which will help students understand the connection between listening comprehension and oral production.

Pronunciation is a field that has generally been neglected in many departments devoted to the teaching and learning of English. Phonetics and phonology, which are indeed necessary for the mastery of any language, are thought to be too theoretical for both elementary and intermediate students who would like to improve their pronunciation skills. Thus, before writing this review, I wanted to use this book in one of my classes for a couple of weeks and see the results myself.

The students that participated in this experiment were in their second university year (intermediate level), majoring in a program called ‘Translation and interpretation: English and Japanese'. Therefore, the students had some linguistic knowledge and at least two semesters of English phonetics. The book's design makes it really easy for students – even if they do not have any extensive knowledge about phonetics – to understand the rationale behind the text, using clear examples and explanations to illustrate not only the sounds but also what the author calls ‘the music of English' (p. xi), which is an essential part in language teaching and learning but which tends to be neglected in the ESL classroom, perhaps due to the emphasis on the repetition of isolated sounds. Clear Speech provides contexts in order to understand how pronunciation works and its impact on both listening comprehension and oral production. In the class, I used the following three sections (Units 3–5) from the ‘Vowels and word stress' chapter of the book: ‘Word stress and vowel length', ‘Word stress and vowel clarity' and ‘Word stress patterns'. Students reacted very well to the activities from the book by saying, for example, that it was nice to add some variety to the pronunciation activities, moving away from the theoretical aspects of phonetics. Particularly useful was the emphasis on word stress, which tends to be quite problematic for elementary and intermediate students of English. The examples in the book are clear and, as a result, the students could easily grasp the concepts underlying the examples.

Another positive aspect of the book is that both teachers and students can find the associated audio files online and for free, which makes the textbook much more accessible for everybody. Similarly, the speaking speed of the sample texts seemed reasonable for students, neither too fast or too hard to understand, nor too artificially slow.

Besides stress, vowel length and clarity, there is another aspect, related to the teaching of English and especially English pronunciation, which tends to be displaced by phonetics and phonology, namely accents, which is another essential issue for students who wish to become proficient users of English. There is a long-standing tradition in Chile for materials devoted to the teaching of pronunciation to focus primarily on the RP (received pronunciation) variety or what is popularly called ‘British English’.

As a teacher, it was a challenge for me to try to break the habit in the students, who were particularly used to studying only British English inside the classroom and hearing American English outside class. The book really helps to provide students with an explicit and systematic comparison between RP and General American. Thus, the students in my class seemed to enjoy the change not only due to the new materials but also to the new pronunciations.

One of the drawbacks of the book could be the fact that some standard IPA symbols are represented differently. Since the students in my class had some previous knowledge of phonetics and the IPA symbols, they found it somewhat confusing at first to work with the new symbols. For example, Clear Speech uses /ey/ instead of the IPA symbol /eɪ/, as in the word mail, or /y/ instead of /j/, as in yes. However, once such differences were clarified, students did not have any problems whatsoever to understand the logic behind the book. Following my three-week teaching experiment, I would say that Clear Speech is a book that can also be used in any regular ESL and EFL classroom since it relies mostly on real life examples that make the teaching of pronunciation and listening comprehension much easier for both teachers and students.