Shaping Learners’ Pronunciation

Book excerpt: A straightforward entry to understanding crucial components of phonological literacy, this essential text explains the theoretical and practical rationale for teaching connected speech (CS) and offers useful pedagogical applications. Brown and Crowther describe the basic phonemes (including consonants, vowels, and diphthongs) of spoken North American English and examine word stress, utterance stress, and timing, as they are related to CS. With accessible, non-technical language, the authors show how phoneme variations, simple transitions, dropping sounds, inserting sounds, and changing sounds operate, and how CS is integral to English language teaching, especially for developing non-native users’ oral English communicative ability. Each chapter features explicit discussions of pedagogical ideas targeting L2 learners, further resources, and CS-oriented exercises that are accessible and easy to implement for L2 teachers. These exercises are accompanied when relevant with recorded audio examples of CS production at www.routledge.com/9780367697570.