New in 2015, the Journal of Second Language Pronunciation (hereafter JSLP) is a welcome addition to the field of pronunciation teaching, learning, assessment and performance research. If it realizes all its aspirations, it will indeed fill a major gap in the journal market.

In this review for JIPA, I will consider the scope of the journal and its value for phoneticians (including phonetically trained teachers of pronunciation).

JSLP advertises itself as a ‘scholarly journal devoted to research into the acquisition, perception, production, teaching, assessment, and description of prosodic and segmental pronunciation of second languages in all contexts of learning’ publishing in four main areas: ‘experimental, instructed, and naturalistic research about second language pronunciation; review articles that synthesize research perspectives of key pronunciation issues from different disciplines; teaching-oriented articles detailing successful practices and research-based instruction; and reviews of technology and books focused on second language pronunciation’ (https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/jslp/main). Quite a lot of this might be expected to be of interest to phoneticians.

Unusually for a general journal, each publication includes an editorial – a custom which I have hitherto tended to associate with special or themed editions. John M. Levis's first editorial explains that the journal is also aiming to establish a ‘disciplinary identity’ (Volume1:Part1, page 1) which will give L2 pronunciation research the status and standing enjoyed by other branches of linguistics and pedagogical research. It is true that some aspects of this field have long been neglected and it is to be hoped that alongside regular conference opportunities such as those offered by the biennial Phonetics Teaching and Learning Conference at UCL (London, UK) and the new, annual, Japanese International Symposium of Applied Phonetics (held for the first time in 2016 in Nagoya), this unique publication will help to attract appropriately trained and qualified researchers to the field, underpinning the discipline's renaissance and growth through regular dissemination of new research and ideas. Its publication at this point in time – some hundred years after the first lectures on the subject by the late great Daniel Jones (see Collins & Mees Reference Collins and Mees2003a, b) who (alongside his colleagues, the German phonetician and language teacher Wilhelm Viëtor and the French Paul Passy) can be considered a pioneer in this field, and over a century since the even earlier contribution to the field made by Henry Sweet (Reference Sweet1899) – is timely. In spite of their importance, practitioner and pedagogical research (typical of L2 pronunciation research in fields such as applied linguistics and applied phonetics) has only recently been recognized as an ‘approved’ area of research in the British government's Research Excellence Framework (see REF 2014). In earlier research assessment events, such research was not deemed worthy of inclusion. It is a perfect time, therefore, for the launch of this new, peer-reviewed platform.

One area JSLP intends to promote, then, is articles reviewing and synthesizing cross-disciplinary research on pronunciation issues. The very first contribution would seem to fall into this wider field. The inaugural volume opens with a substantial article by the experienced and highly respected L2 pronunciation researchers, Murray J. Munro and Tracey M. Derwing (Munro & Derwing 1:1, 11–42). Their review delineates the parameters of L2 pronunciation research and the future directions this might take. They seek first and foremost to promote good practice in research project design (seminal to establishing respectability for the field), and they argue persuasively and convincingly for agreement on terminology in order to establish coherence and cohesion. Munro & Derwing also underline how important it is for all researchers to be thoroughly familiar with the wealth of literature that already exists (establishing an awareness which impacts not only on sometimes unnecessary replication but also on the precise use of terminology). The field will not secure its future status by simply reinventing the wheel. Nor will it establish credibility by misuse or conflicting use of basic terminology. Munro & Derwing's meticulous and considered advice is an ideal opening statement for a new journal in a revitalized field. The article should perhaps be mandatory reading for all future prospective contributors.

JSLP publishes biannually. Apart from Munro & Derwing's overview, Part 1 (the first issue) of the first volume concentrates mainly on acquisition and production, with two of the three remaining articles falling into this category (Emiko Kaneko, Younghyon Heo, Gregory Iverson & Ian Wilson (1:1, 65–85) on the acquisition of English coronal fricatives by native speakers of Japanese; and Dorothy M. Chun, Yan Jiang, Justine Meyr & Rong Yang (1:1, 86–114) on the acquisition of L2 Mandarin Chinese tones). The remaining article (Rachel Hayes-Harb & Jane F. Hacking 1:1, 43–64) considers the reasoning behind listeners’ responses in rating judgements. Part 1 thus covers two of the four areas listed above – what I imagine is ‘experimental, instructed, and naturalistic research’ on the one hand and a wider review-style article on the other.

Part 2 includes a further six articles and three book reviews, ensuring coverage in all four projected areas in this first volume. In his editorial, Levis optimistically rates these numbers (ten articles overall in the first year of publication and three book reviews) as indicators of the already ‘greater visibility of the area’ (Levis 1:2, 130). In terms of the four key areas, articles in Part 2 relate to three of these.

The ‘experimental, instructed, and naturalistic research’ category is again dominant and includes five of the six articles. Ksenia Gnevsheva's sociophonetics article on style-shift in vowel production (1:2, 135–156), Greg Raver-Lampman, Felicia Toreno & Janet Bing on an acceptable non-alveolar Japanese /s/ (1:2, 238–253) and Fred Eckman, Gregory Iverson & Jae Yung Song on overt and covert contrasts (1:2, 254–278), Osborne on /h/ and /ɹ/ perception by Brazilian Portuguese learners of English (1:2, 157–180) and Izabela Anna Jułkowska & Juli Cebrian's investigation of the effects of listener factors and stimulus properties on intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness in L2 speech (1:2, 211–237). There is a small pedagogical component in Sofia Romanelli, Andrea Cecilia Menegotto & Ron Smyth (1:2, 181–210) on stress perception by English speaking learners of Spanish – a nod in the direction of teaching-oriented articles detailing successful practices and research-based instruction.

A small criticism of the issues to date concerns editing and proofing of contributions. This on the whole is excellent. However, as well as a few typos in the first editorial pages (omission of ‘Association’ from the IATEFL gloss (1:1, 2), repetition of ‘pronunciation’ in ‘the amount of L2 pronunciation research pronunciation published’ (1:1, 2) and the lack of number concord in ‘basic research in any field fill gaps in knowledge’ and ‘encourage basic research that question things’ (both instances on 1:1, 5)), there is one glaring mis-transcription in this issue when, on page 54, a central mid rounded vowel symbol ‘/ɵ/’ from the IPA extensions symbols is used to represent the voiceless dental fricative /θ/. This is not ‘scholarly’ and might even be interpreted as suggesting a lack of phonetic awareness – given that a particular effort would need to be made to find and key in this particular vowel symbol, its use instead of the more easily accessed /θ/ is a sort of undergraduate mistake rather than one that might be expected in a research article; it is not a casual error.

Otherwise, there are perhaps a couple of further points worth making. These also concern phonetics. In the article contributed by Raver-Lampman et al., there is a misuse of the transcription conventions which phoneticians normally apply to sounds. Discussion of ‘sounds’ (1:2, 238) is illustrated by symbols in slant phonemic brackets. Slant brackets are used to indicate contrastive linguistic units, phonemes. Phonemes are not sounds. The authors are actually talking about [s] and [ʃ] sounds. However, in both the publications they reference and in what they themselves write, there seems to be no awareness of the difference between real (spoken) sounds and abstract contrastive units. This is a common error in the applied linguistics literature, but one which it is very disappointing to find in a new, peer-reviewed academic journal concerned specifically with pronunciation. Here, I would expect to find proper phonetics.

The discussion continues, saying that ‘in Japanese the /ʃ/ sound only occurs before the high front vowel /i/’ (1:2, 238). This is wrong on two counts. Apart from the use, again, of phonemic brackets to represent an actual sound, Japanese does not have a [ʃ]-sound (and certainly not a /ʃ/ phoneme) – the Japanese pre-[i] sound is [ɕ]. This palatalization before [i] affects four Japanese phonemes, /t d s z/, the alveolopalatal variants ([ ɕ ʑ]) are allophones of those phonemes. Without specifically tailored ear-training, the allophonic differences ([s] ~ [ɕ], etc.) are usually inaudible to the native speaker of Japanese. The random switching of values before [i] in English is confirmation of that – speakers can actually make both sounds, yes, but they almost certainly think they are producing the same sound all the time. This is a perceptual problem first, and only second a possible articulatory one. Simply teaching apical or laminal articulatory variants alone is not enough – and both, by the way, are alveolar in the broad sense: apico-alveolar and lamino-alveolar. Expressions such as ‘non-contrastive allophones’ (1:2, 241) in this article are also unhelpful. Of course allophones are non-contrastive; that is why they are allophones. As soon as there is a contrast, we are – by definition – looking at phonemes. These are two very basic items of terminology that really do need to be mastered and used correctly (by reviewers, editors and contributors alike).

Overall, then, there is enormous potential here for JSLP to make a major contribution to the field of second language pronunciation teaching and learning research and to raise the profile of that field. I would like to see this succeed. But I have two concerns.

My first concern is that the field had its roots, initially, in phonetics at a time when teachers and researchers understood that they needed to be phonetically trained (this was, in fact, the very reason for the inception of the International Phonetic Association's original Certificate examinations in the phonetics of French, German and English (follow the Exam link at https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org for the present English Certificate syllabus) – originally devised as a phonetics qualification for language teachers, enabling them to better understand and train the pronunciation of the languages they were teaching, and certifying their competence and ability to do this). JSLP needs to be editorially more stringent regarding phonetic accuracy and phonetic versus phonological distinctions. As it stands, some of the phonetic content is below par. In this, it perpetuates the misconceptions and mistakes that are so prevalent elsewhere in the wider applied linguistics literature. The phonetics in JSLP has to be above criticism.

My second concern is what I might call the reach of the journal, in terms not only of readers but also, and in particular, of contributors. To develop and improve, we need to hear from practitioners of all kinds – not just academics, researching a project, but also from front-line practitioners, teachers, and even students engaged in the day-to-day business of pronunciation training. I am not convinced that many of the contributors have hands-on experience of what they are researching and yet it is in the field that many important insights and experiences wait to be discovered and reported. There are two sides to the coin that is second language pronunciation – the theoretical and the practical. If JSLP could achieve exposure and promotion of both of these in the coming years, that would be a true mark of distinction and success.