FOUZ GONZALEZ, JONAS
This book is intended to help readers (well, listeners!) become familiarised with the phonological system of English in a very practical manner. Theoretical notions about phonetics and phonology would be incredibly beneficial in order to complement the activities in this book. Nevertheless, they have been intentionally omitted here due to the
practical nature of the volume. If readers are not familiar with the basics of English phonetics and phonology, they are strongly encouraged to check books such as Gimson¿s Pronunciation of English (Cruttenden, 2014), English Phonetics and Phonology (Roach, 2009), or Practical Phonetics and Phonology (Collins & Mees, 2013). Readers would benefit enormously from learning about the physiology of speech (aspects such as voicing, place of articulation, manner of articulation, tongue height, tongue location, lip posture, etc.), the phonotactics of the language, vowel reduction, lexical and sentence stress patterns, as well as other connected speech phenomena, such as intonation, linking, assimilation, or elision. This book has been conceived with the intention of providing additional perceptual and transcription practice to students in English phonetics or English pronunciation courses, but it will be equally useful for any foreign language (FL) learner who finds it difficult to perceive and conceptualise English pronunciation adequately. This is one of the most common challenges FL learners face with pronunciation, as their perception and production of the FL is strongly conditioned by their L1. FL learners are used to thinking about FL pronunciation in terms of their L1 sounds and are often biased by the influence of orthography. Thus,
this book includes a wide range of perceptual training activities and transcription practice that will help readers become familiarised with the Introduction 2 phonological system of English, work on their perception of English sounds and patterns
