Teaching Pronunciation

There is a huge amount of information and material available for pronunciation teachers. You can get a good idea of the books on the market at the moment by looking at a list on Amazon.

• The Cambridge animated demonstrations of sounds are referred to elsewhere in our web material, but just in case you missed them, you can see them here.
• David Brett's website contains much useful information and practice. Click here, then choose English Phonetics and Phonology.
• You can find a lot of practical information, lesson plans etc. here.
• Notes by Ted Power on pronunciation problems, etc. here.
• You can try a "click the button to hear the phoneme" here, but it's not very consistent in length of sounds and consonant context.
• A free on-line pronunciation dictionary giving British (BBC) pronunciations of about 125,000 words is available here.
• There are some simple ideas for activities in a paper by David Dalton here.
• A paper by John Wells (quite difficult reading compared with most of the material listed here) looks at the goals of pronunciation teaching in the light of the debate about International English and the Lingua Franca Core here.
• There's a site by Sunburst that's quite bewildering in the quantity and variety of web materials gathered into various lists for people working with speech, here. I must admit I haven't had time to check out all of the sites listed.
• Michael Ashby has written a very clear and well-organised summary of phonetics and pronunciation teaching. Read it here.
• It's worth keeping a regular eye on the British Council/BBC website for English Teaching here. The area that discusses pronunciation matters specifically is here. You can join in discussions and make your own contributions if you register as a user.
• Keep an eye also on the website of the Pronunciation Special Interest Group (PronSIG) of IATEFL for information about a lively and interesting group of teachers of English pronunciation.
• Alongside the above, see the BBC World Service English teaching site here.
• You can read a very simple introduction to (American) English pronunciation here.
• There's a big collection of simple pronunciation exercises here. (I haven't had time to check them all out).
• Cambridge University Press has produced a series of "pedagogical booklets" which can be downloaded free. Judy Gilbert has written the most important one, on teaching pronunciation, but there are eight others on various topics - look at them here.
• There is a useful website to accompany the well-known course 'Ship or Sheep?' (Ann Baker), which not only contains pronunciation exercises but also advice on errors likely to be made by speakers of a wide range of particular languages, a very useful resource. Click here.
• An interesting paper discussing the nature of pronunciation teaching from a psychological point of view here.

Teaching Phonetics and Phonology

• For a useful introduction to English phonetics and phonology for students, see http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang/phonology.htm
• David Brett's website (mentioned above) is recommended under this heading too. Click here, then choose English Phonetics and Phonology.
• There's an interesting phonetic transcription exercise site that you can work with, but it's not immediately available to everyone - tutors have to register and set up a student group. It works nicely, though. Tutors can construct their own transcription exercises, and there's an on-screen phonetic typewriter keyboard for typing your transcription. See http://www.wtt.org.uk/
• Lots of interesting links about phonetics on an American site, http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/PhonResources/PhonResources.html
• Exercises in phonetics by John Maidment here

updated March 30th 2009