Pronouncing English

Teschner and Whitley have produced a fascinating book that will be an invaluable resource to all interested in the study and teaching of English pronunciation. -- Grant Goodall, professor and director of the linguistics language program at the University of California, San Diego Teschner and Whitley succeed in their goals of providing a methodical, thorough, and engaging treatment of stress in English pronunciation and writing, as well as providing an essential pedagogical guide for teachers of English. Material in the appendix and the accompanying CD-ROM provide useful background and support for teachers and beginning students. Clearly written and superbly exemplified, this is an outstanding textbook for undergraduates and graduate students in English, linguistics and language pedagogy. -- Kamil Ud Deen, assistant professor of linguistics, University of Hawai'i at Manoa Pronouncing English provides a comprehensive introduction to English phonetics that is innovatively structured, theoretically sound, and exceedingly practical. Teschner and Whitley have written a lively and informative text that will be rewarding and entertaining for students-and their instructors-in any field concerned with the English language. -- Garland D. Bills, professor emeritus of linguistics and of Spanish & Portuguese, University of New Mexico

A textbook for teaching English phonetics and phonology, this title offers a "stress-based" approach while incorporating all the standard course topics.Pronouncing English is a textbook for teaching English phonetics and phonology, offering an original "stress-based" approach while incorporating all the standard course topics. Drawing on current linguistic theory, it uniquely analyzes prosody first, and then discusses its effects on pronunciation-emphasizing suprasegmental features such as meter, stress, and intonation, then the vowels and consonants themselves. Distinguished by being the first work of its kind to be based on an exhaustive statistical analysis of all the lexical entries of an entire dictionary, Pronouncing English is complemented by a list of symbols and a glossary. Richard Teschner and M. Stanley Whitley present an improved description of English pronunciation and conclude each chapter with suggestions on how to do a better job of teaching it. An appendix with a brief introduction to acoustic phonetics-the basis for the perception vs. the production of sounds-is also included. Revolutionary in its field, Pronouncing English declares that virtually all aspects of English pronunciation-from the vowel system to the articulation of syllables, words, and sentences-are determined by the presence or absence of stress. The accompanying CD-ROM carries audio recordings of many of the volume's exercises, more than 100 text and sound files, and data files on which the statistical observations were based.