For those who want to teach a one-semester introduction to the phonetics and phonology of English, there is now a good range of coursebooks on offer. Mehmet Yavaş's Applied English phonology is a useful addition to that range. Part of the originality of Applied English phonology is that it is designed for an audience that will not necessarily be going on to specialise in the phonetics/phonology of English. It is aimed at students majoring in applied linguistics and speech pathology, and at students in TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) courses. However, it could also be used as an introductory coursebook for students majoring in English.

The author has chosen ‘American English’ as his reference accent, and by this, he means something like ‘General American’ (GA), which, like all accent or dialect names, is something of an idealisation, albeit to some extent a valid one. Given that the book is written by a scholar based in the U.S.A., it is surprisingly thin on different varieties of American English (and does not cover synchronic changes in American English such as the Northern Cities Vowel Shift), while at the same time it contains an overview of the segmental phonology of as many as five Caribbean varieties of English. I assume that the author is simply playing to his strengths in having made these choices.

Applied English phonology is original and unique among books of its sort in other respects. For instance, in addition to covering segmental phonetics, syllable structure, word stress and English intonation in a clear and accessible manner, it also incorporates an introduction to acoustic phonetics and to graphophonemics. I know of no other introduction to English phonetics and phonology which covers all of this. Now that free software is downloadable for acoustic phonetic analysis, it has become feasible to teach acoustic phonetics even in departments that lack a phonetics lab, so the book's coverage of acoustic phonetics could prove really useful. With respect to graphophonemics, non-native speakers learning English are inclined to conclude that the relationship between spelling and pronunciation in English is almost entirely haphazard. The brief chapter on graphophonemics in this book (chapter 9, ‘Spelling and pronunciation’) should help such learners gain some insight into English grapheme–phoneme correspondences. The chapter contains a list of phonemes and their corresponding graphemes, and then a list of graphemes with their corresponding phonemic values. The chapter's section on the historical background to present-day spellings is also useful. It might have been wise, however, to point out that the two values for each of the five basic vowel graphemes constitute pairs of ‘free’ (tense/long) and ‘checked’ (lax/short) vowels.

Another attractive feature of Yavaş's book is that it has a chapter devoted to second language learning of English by adults from a wide range of language backgrounds (chapter 8, ‘Structural factors in second language phonology’), viz. Spanish, Turkish, Greek, French, German, Arabic, Russian, Korean, Portuguese and Farsi. This contrastive chapter is likely to prove helpful to teachers and students of English phonetics and phonology in countries where those languages are spoken. Teaching English to speakers of six of these languages in an English department in France, I find this aspect of the book pedagogically useful. However, teachers who use Received Pronunciation (RP) rather than, or in addition to, GA as their target accent may feel limited by the sole choice of GA as a reference accent (other English phonology textbooks, such as Giegerich's Reference Giegerich1992 book, have at least both GA and RP as reference accents).

Inevitably, this book, like any coursebook, has its weaknesses. In chapter 7, ‘Stress and intonation’, Yavaş takes the standard view of generative phonology (stemming from Chomsky & Halle Reference Chomsky and Morris1968 and earlier) and argues that word stress in English is sensitive, not just to stress-affecting suffixes and syntactic category, but also to the ‘weight’ of the syllable, with putatively heavy syllables attracting primary stress. The line of argumentation here, given by many textbook authors including myself, is that nouns and adjectives in English tend to have primary stress on the penultimate syllable, whereas verbs tend to have primary stress on the final syllable, with syllable weight playing a prominent role. While there is clearly something in this weight-sensitive approach to English word stress, there are also problems with it. Take the verbs conquer and concur: according to the syllable weight approach, the fact that the final syllable of concur has a heavy syllable is said to play a role in its being stressed, while the non-heavy final syllable of conquer is said to play a role in its not being stressed. But the reasoning is circular: is the final syllable of conquer not stressed because it is light, or is it light because it is unstressed? (Which came first? The chicken or the egg?) It is also worth mentioning that this approach works badly for the Caribbean varieties of English mentioned in this book, where word stresses often fall in unusual places, perhaps because of the tendency towards syllable-timing in Caribbean Englishes and the consequent non-reduction of vowels in what would be unstressed syllables in other varieties such as GA or RP, making those syllables heavy. The same is true for Indian English. And the weight-sensitive approach completely fails to work for Scottish English: the so-called heavy syllables are just not there in very many cases, since the vowel length is absent. One additional reservation I have about the chapter on stress and intonation is that the nature of English rhythm and the role of the metrical foot are not highlighted. In this respect, Applied English phonology compares unfavourably to Giegerich (Reference Giegerich1992), even if it is to be commended for providing clear and concise exercises (which Giegerich's book lacks altogether). On the other hand, I prefer the treatment of prominence patterns in compounds in Applied English phonology to that in Collins & Mees (Reference Collins and Mees2003), since the latter book does not insist that primary stress placement in English is calculated from the end of the word.

While it is, in my view, regrettable (if understandable) that Yavaş focuses on GA to the detriment of non-American standard varieties, such as RP, which is still taught around the world, he does refer to RP, and discusses differences between ‘American’ and ‘British’ English. He also briefly covers a variety of British accents, including Scottish English, Northern Irish English and Welsh English, although the details of these are sometimes incorrect.

It is striking that the notions ‘segment’ and ‘phoneme’ are still in robust good health in introductions to phonetics and phonology, despite repeated injunctions from various quarters that these notions be abandoned. Like almost all phonology textbook authors, Yavaş introduces the essentials of the phonemic principle early on (principally, overlapping vs. complementary distribution and contrastive vs. non-constrastive phonetic differences). It is noteworthy that even Silverman, whose excellent 2006 textbook seeks to abandon all talk of phonemes (arguing that our belief in phonemes is a result of ‘alphabetism’), nonetheless deals with segments throughout his book, and indeed introduces the International Phonetic Alphabet from the very outset. The vowel chart, based on the tongue arch theory of vowel articulation, is also in good health in twenty-first-century introductory textbooks, appearing in Applied English phonology, Collins & Mees (Reference Collins and Mees2003) and Silverman (Reference Silverman2006).

It is a pity that there is no CD (or a website with sound files) to accompany this book: when one is dealing with phonetics/phonology, it is best if students hear what is being described by the author. Hence, some might be tempted to adopt Collins & Mees (Reference Collins and Mees2003), which features a really useful CD, as a coursebook alternative to Applied English phonology (though the two books will not be seen as direct competitors for some courses). I hope that Yavaş will put this right in a future second edition of this effective book. Finally, Yavaş is to be commended for making available an errata sheet which lists a dozen or so slips, which are easy to make when writing a textbook on phonetics and phonology, since there are always countless small details to be got right.

Despite the few reservations expressed above, my view is that this is a unique, well-conceived, well-written and well-executed book. If you are teaching an introductory course on English phonetics and phonology in the U.S.A., or in a country where GA is taught, you should consider using Applied English phonology.