The Book of Pronunciation: Proposals for a Practical Pedagogy is an attractive paperback resource that is part of a series of books aimed at English language teachers. The book has a two-column layout with rather small print, and includes an audio CD comprising ninety-three recordings of ‘native speakers of English whose pronunciation is typical of young people from the south of England’ (p. 9). The material is organised into three sections: Part A (pp. 7–36), which is a theoretical overview of pronunciation features, and the issues surrounding their teaching and learning; Part B (pp. 37–153), the core of the book, made of a generous selection of a hundred and ten classroom activities; and Part C (pp. 156–174), introducing further reflections and guidance on pronunciation teaching issues in general. In spite of a few theoretical and organisational limitations, and the not-so-reader-friendly design, this is a good practical resource for pronunciation-savvy teachers of English as a second or foreign language wishing to get further ideas as to how to integrate phonetics to their teaching.
In the opening lines of Part A, the authors, Jonathan Marks & Tim Bowen, state that a pronunciation book for teachers should include not only a description of phonetic content, but also a wide array of activities to incorporate these to the lesson. More interestingly, according to the authors, a book of this kind should seek to provide ‘answers to your [the teacher's] reservations’ (p. 7) about the value of pronunciation work, while also help to boost teacher confidence in dealing with it. It could be said that the authors fulfil their promise of variety with a wealth of creative ideas that touch upon a considerable number of pronunciation issues, ranging from accents and identity, spelling-to-sound relations, and prominence, to less commonly tackled topics, such as chunking + tone collocations, sound symbolism, and poetry. On the other hand, even though Marks & Bowen acknowledge that theirs is but only a ‘brief overview’ (p. 30) (and understandably so), the sequencing and selection of theoretical aspects as they have been presented may slightly confuse or scare away teachers with limited knowledge of English pronunciation.
Nonetheless, the book has to be credited with covering at some length a number of issues, namely glottalling, extreme reductions in connected speech, stress shift, and the functional contexts of use of some intonation contours, that most teacher resources (with the exception of Cauldwell Reference Cauldwell2013, Vaughan-Rees Reference Vaughan-Rees2010, and Hewings Reference Hewings2007) fail to address.
The first section of Part A (pp. 7–11) collects some of the common misconceptions many teachers hold in relation to pronunciation work. In terms of instructional aims, Marks & Bowen provide reassurance that teachers’ own experience of learning English pronunciation as a second or foreign language (L2) should make them an ‘inspiring’ model for their students (p. 10). The authors uphold ‘international intelligibility’ as a target, but rightly point out that there is no such thing as a variety that can ensure mutual intelligibility across all languages in the world. They also emphasise that teachers should consider different student motivations when it comes to deciding what accents to introduce for production purposes. Quite surprisingly, given these remarks, the audio material and the phonemic inventory proposed in the book are biased towards the variety known as Southern Standard British English (SSBE, Collins & Mees Reference Collins and Mees2012).
The second section of Part A (pp. 12–36) is an overview of the basics of English pronunciation and intonation, the extensive length of which the authors rightly justify by stating that ‘the more you understand about the pronunciation of English, the better you will be able to understand their [the learners’] difficulties’ (p.30). However, it is, perhaps, the section in the book in want of greater orderliness and accuracy. General problems include a lack of clear differentiation between what is phonemic and what is allophonic, slightly confusing ordering criteria in the description of consonants (manner of articulation interspersed with place of articulation), the description of phonological processes, such as syllabicity, and a not-very-schematic presentation of the components of intonation.
Consonants and phonemic notation are first introduced through stops. The discussion includes distributional allophonic differences such as held release, and aspiration. However, these are not presented as allophonic variants here nor in the appropriate ‘phonemes and allophones’ section, where there is only an explicit reference to coarticulatory processes for [t] preceding rounded or spread vowels. Allophonic processes are part of the description of different sounds later in the section, but these appear in the guise of ‘phonetic vs. phonemic transcription’ issues. Another slightly confusing section is the one called ‘other consonant sounds’, where the glottals are introduced as a group of their own, even though the criterion of description in this section had previously been manner of articulation rather than place.
There is a short section devoted to variation across accents of English, but this is, sadly, not accompanied by any tracks on the CD.
The section on connected speech contains possibly the clearest and most exhaustive of all the explanations in the book. It includes catenation, linking /j w r/, intrusive /r/, as well as the illustration of speech ‘short cuts’: assimilation, elision, and reduction. Useful and non-prescriptivist remarks that teachers need to be aware of are also featured, such as the blurring of past–infinitive distinctions after elisions have taken place, and the creation of new homophones as the result of these processes.
The introduction to intonation begins with the authors’ acknowledgement that prosody is ‘basic to the very fabric of speech’, even if ‘slippery’ (p. 26), and that it allows learners to speak confidently, intelligibly and meaningfully. One of the highlights is the practical proposal for an integrated teaching of tonality and tone alongside set phrases (pp. 125, 130–132), or as grammatical chunks (pp. 141–154), e.g. the use of fall-rises on the presentation of background information in narratives that do ‘scene-setting’ work, and on conditionals. Some other remarks concerning tone may not be so easy to make sense of: ‘the excessive use of the rise over the fall-rise can contribute towards an impression of unfriendliness, uncooperativeness, etc.’ (p. 29).
The last section in Part A is comprised of useful lists of spelling-to-sound and sound-to-spelling relations, silent letters, weak and strong forms, and word stress rules.
The theoretical and organisational limitations of Part A are compensated for in the richness of ideas and coverage of further pronunciation issues in Part B. This second division of the book introduces a selection of activities, arranged according to topic, and suitable for adaptation to different contexts and levels. Each task includes a heading that specifies their duration and difficulty level, and the procedural description has been organised around a four-P structure: proposal, preparation, procedure, and prolongation. The first part presents techniques for introducing the phonemic chart proposed by Underhill (Reference Underhill2005). In this respect, and with the exception of a few selective remarks in Part A and Part C, the book does not seem to really aid teachers in finding practical, tangible, non-technical, tips and tricks for the physical discovery of articulation, suggesting instead that teachers ‘give a clear model, then ask the learners to repeat’ (p. 40).
The awareness-raising tasks on suprasegmentals are well-supported by the audio files, though the key to the activity on tonic prominence (p. 46) can be slightly confusing, since there seem to be fewer chunks and prominences than those in the audio. Likewise, the task aimed at differentiating intonation patterns (pp. 47–48) introduces recorded stylised calling contours together with fall-rises, and this may have an effect in the students’ accurate perception of tones.
The second chapter in Part B gives tools for teachers to adapt classical activities such as bingo, silent miming, scrabble, odd one out, categories, and Simon Says, to introduce phonemic and spelling-to-sound awareness. The most useful cross-linguistic awareness-raising task in this section suggests the creation of bilingual minimal pairs (p. 65), and the exploration of differences in the pronunciation of proper names of cities and celebrities across languages (p. 66). Another good contribution is the variety in activities to explore sound symbolism (p. 64) and alliteration and rhyme (pp. 62–63).
The tasks in Chapter 3 are aimed at training students in existing connections between sounds and spelling, including practice with homophones and homographs (p. 74–75), as well as with the pronunciation of abbreviations (p. 82). The exploratory activity on schwa and its ubiquity is easily adaptable and possibly effective, although some of the transcriptions proposed raise some questions, such as the use of the strong form for he and the.
Chapter 4 introduces word stress, and it covers a number of key features that learners need to be aware of, such as noun–verb grammatical distinctions and ambiguity, word formation processes with the addition of suffixes, stress shift, and different compound word combination – the last of these contextualised within lexical sets, such as professions (p. 91).
The best activities on connected speech invite the presentation of weak and strong forms through key collocations, such as fish and chips, and the exploration of possible and ‘illegal’ contractions (pp. 100–101 and p. 110, respectively), as well as the discovery of orthographic reductions in speech as represented in comics (p. 102). In general, the audio files properly illustrate these phenomena but, as with the rest of the book, snippets from other accents, as well as the inclusion of non-scripted, spontaneous speech, would have helped in providing variety and wholly fulfilling the awareness-raising objective of this section.
Chapter 6 explores stress, rhythm and intonation. It suggests awareness of rhythm through embodied behaviour (p. 119), as well as through shadowing practices and list chanting (pp. 120, 135). The authors suggest teaching meaningful chunking and pausing through the conversion of poetry intro prose and back (pp. 123–125), though it should have been emphasised that pauses are not the only markers of a possible prosodic break. A surprise addition is an exercise on ‘long tails’ (p. 136), which happen to be, in fact, counterpresuppositionals (Cruttenden Reference Cruttenden1997), but sadly, this is not exploited, nor explained, further.
Part C is aimed at teachers who want to extend their knowledge on various areas of pronunciation and intonation. The first section contains a knowledge quiz, as well as a task that challenges teachers to explain failed homophony attempts in jokes. The authors expand their discussion of sounds with what they call ‘exotic sounds’ (i.e. sounds not found in English, with phonemic status at least, such as the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative) and later comment on several L2 phonemic inventories that may bring about first-language interference processes, an essential issue that teachers would probably welcome an expansion on.
The section also introduces extreme reductions in the stream of speech (based on Cauldwell Reference Cauldwell2003) using Laver's (Reference Laver1994) list of pronunciations for actually as illustration, and some reflections on how regularities of English allow one to distinguish words from non-words.
The second section focuses on learning, and includes a summary of the discussion of English as a Lingua Franca as established by Jenkins (Reference Jenkins2000) and Walker (Reference Walker2010). It encourages teachers to engage students in accent prejudice research, as well as on the exploration of the affective reactions and intelligibility barriers that non-native varieties of English may generate in listeners.
The last section of the book introduces some imaginary classroom scenarios with failed outcomes, and provides a detailed explanation of those pronunciation principles that could have improved these fictional teaching decisions gone awry. Teachers are invited to consider further ways of integrating pronunciation in the lesson by linking phonetics to grammatical and lexical content, as well as to specific activities and skills in the course book. Moreover, there is a selection of good discussion questions, as well as a useful list of further reading. It could be said that this section introduces some of the elements missing in Part A, and teachers may perhaps want to study these two parts together to make sure they have a more complete grasp of the issues alluded to, or taken for granted, in the design of the activities in Part B.
The Book of Pronunciation was written by two well-established authors who are obviously experienced teachers. It succeeds in showing teachers ways in which pronunciation work can be integrated to other content in the lesson, as a focal point or incidentally, and it illustrates the numerous contexts in which pronunciation features have a role. The lack of recordings of spontaneous speech, and the sole choice of an SSBE accent throughout, with the not-fully-orderly introduction of theoretical notions to some extent limits, but does not in any way cancel, the potential of an otherwise very good resource for more experienced English language teachers wishing to do serious and wide-ranging pronunciation work in the classroom.
