Practising English Pronunciation

This book is intended to help readers (well, listeners!) becomefamiliarised with the phonological system of English in a verypractical manner. Theoretical notions about phonetics and phonologywould be incredibly beneficial in order to complement the activitiesin this book. Nevertheless, they have been intentionally omitted heredue to thepractical nature of the volume. If readers are not familiar with thebasics of English phonetics and phonology, they are stronglyencouraged to check books such as Gimson¿s Pronunciation of English(Cruttenden, 2014), English Phonetics and Phonology (Roach, 2009), orPractical Phonetics and Phonology (Collins & Mees, 2013). Readerswould benefit enormously from learning about the physiology of speech(aspects such as voicing, place of articulation, manner ofarticulation, tongue height, tongue location, lip posture, etc.), thephonotactics of the language, vowel reduction, lexical and sentencestress patterns, as well as other connected speech phenomena, such asintonation, linking, assimilation, or elision. This book has beenconceived with the intention of providing additional perceptual andtranscription practice to students in English phonetics or Englishpronunciation courses, but it will be equally useful for any foreignlanguage (FL) learner who finds it difficult to perceive andconceptualise English pronunciation adequately. This is one of themost common challenges FL learners face with pronunciation, as theirperception and production of the FL is strongly conditioned by theirL1. FL learners are used to thinking about FL pronunciation in termsof their L1 sounds and are often biased by the influence oforthography. Thus,this book includes a wide range of perceptual training activities andtranscription practice that will help readers become familiarised with the Introduction 2 phonological system of English, work on theirperception of English sounds and patterns