Customer Reviews

Pronunciation Games (Cambridge Copy Collection)

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I was surprised when I received this book to find that the pronunciation taught by these games is RP (Received Pronunciation) or British English. Though some of the games deal with intonation, word stress, etc., and can be used for teaching American English, be aware that many of these games will not be useful for teaching American English pronunciation.
However, if you are teaching British English pronunciation, this book could be a nice resource.

"Pronunication Games" is a book designed for Elementary to Intermediate students, and presents a number of activities targetting various facets of phonology. These include stress, intonation, connected speech and the like.

The games range from the bog-simple to quite complex affairs. I have found students quite enjoy them and they offer a good range of activity types.

While I would not rely entirely on this book, it does provide a good variety of games that students will mostly enjoy and have fun with.

Pronunciation Games displays the typical British sense of humor in "Sound Pictures" when it uses a picture of a vulture in a cage above the refrigerator. In some of the word games and mazes, the British RP dialect sans final /r/ is seen in words such as 'car,' 'bear,' and 'dear.' There are various games to play from beginning levels to the more advanced. In addition, this book is reproducible. If you want to teach RP or pick up a British accent while having some fun, this is the book for you. However, a few of the games and word pictures can be used for teaching GA or American English.

The book is not bad as an additional resource in the classroom. There tends to be an over use of the phonetic alphabet which can make the games more an academic exercise, rather than a fun way to learn pronunciation. Other than that, there a numerous other activities which help students put the correct stress on a word. The stress activities are very good.

Teaching pronunciation is not a comfortable activity for many ESL teachers. The jury is still out on how to do it. I use Helen Fraser's method, teaching students volume, sentence stress, word stress, vowel length, vowel sound and consonant sound in that order. I use largely teacher-made resources.
Hancock's games provide some welcome ready-made activities in most of these areas. Some of the activities fall into the old trap of needing instructions that are too complicated for the level they are aimed at. Most are fairly clear and look as though they will do their job. I will use them for revision for my interpreting students in the next few weeks so may have more info soon. PS I also find Hancock's CD, English Pronunciation, a very useful resource, particularly for students who have persistent problems distinguishing consonant demarcations in English.

I bought this book based on seeing it used in a Pronunciation class that I took. I bought it for use in my ESL classroom. It's great because it addresses a variety of pronunciation issues via games for a variety of learner levels. It has easy to follow directions, and it's photocopiable. I've already used a few of the games with my class and the students love it. This book helps to add fun to a potentially boring topic!!

"Pronunciation Games" is exactly what I hoped it would be. I've been trying to find fun, diverse ways to focus on pronuncation (not just looking at minimal pairs). This fresh approach to pronunciation is appreciated both by the students and myself. Also, there is very minimal preparation required for the games. Several games require cutting up papers (for card games), but most do not. I've found that most ESL game books require this and I'm glad "Pronunciation Games" does not.

This book has made the teaching, and learning, of pronunciation a joy. It has changed both my own and my students' attitude towards pronunciation lessons.