Customer Reviews

Pronunciation Pairs Student's Book with Audio CD

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Unfortunately, I must have put this book in my cart before Mara Moreno posted her review. She is right; the CD contains a very small portion of the listening activities, and it seems the activities were chosen in such a manner as to be sure the ones a reader would most want are not included. The activities on the CD are not very useful. I bought the book to use with a student I tutor. Fortunately I purchased another book at the same time: Mastering the American Accent, by Lisa Mojsin. Mojsin's book is much more useful. It comes with four great CDs that cover all the listening exercises. Also, the Mojsin book addresses prosidy (although the word 'prosidy' is not used). Prosidy, the rhythm and melody of speech, is very important in English. The Mojsin book covers such prosidy concepts as thought groups, focus words, content words, and function words. If a student does not learn the proper English prosidy, he will not only have speech problems, but will also have problems understanding the spoken word. For instance, when tested, my student could hear no difference between "Is that Mr. Fogg?" and "is that mist, or fog?" Before purchasing Pronunciation Pairs, consider Mojsin's book.

I knew I was ordering "an audio CD with selections from the complete class audio program", but I never imagined the CD would just contain a few dialogs. Since I did expect the CD would contain most of the listening exercises and activities, I am very disappointed with this product.

I teach highly motivated, well-educated adult students at a Language Center in New York. I use Pronunciation Pairs with the intermediate level adults. Almost every student has purchased this book for their personal library. It's instructions are clear, exercises in listening, discrimination and practice are excellent. The layout is user friendly and appropriate for adults.

I am an English tutor for people from Japan. I think this is an awesome book in many ways. My students also like it. There is a very helpful audio cd and the lessons contain a variety of pronunciation related topics. Infortunately, there were a few sellers on Amazon and Ebay that were false advertising their used books and the books were in very bad condition. I recommend ording this in New! condition only (or sellers you already know and trust)as those sellers were truthful. I also highly recommend the teachers manual as it has a great deal of insight into how to teach people coming from specific language backgrounds.

Overall I like this book as a way to teach pronunciation to learners of English as a Second Language. The use of similar words that are pronounced differently is a great way to highlight pronunciation problems and to effectively overcome those problems. The book is broken up into units, each of which treating a different phoneme. Although there is a teachers' edition of the book, this one is fine for both teachers and learners.

My only complaint deals with the audio CD that is included. Whereas each unit has a number of tasks (starting with the pronunciation pair exercise), the CD only includes one task per unit, and never the pronunciation pairs. This has been frustrating for my current learner.

It's amazing how we take for granted the very different sounds in English and how easily we produce them. Not so easy for someone learning English as a second language! The minimal pair contrasts between the different vowels is particularly helpful, along with the CD. I'm a speech pathologist and I'm helping tutor an advanced ESL student who is having some difficulty with the subtle difference between the many different vowel sounds we have- his book has really helped.

Like other reviewers, I expected to receive a CD with all of the dialogues. I teach ESL, and when I tried to use this book with a student, I was mortified to discover that half of the dialogues aren't on the CD. I have a book that sits on the shelf unused! I'll give it 2 stars because at least the visuals are good and you can use some of the CD.

This book did not come with the printed invoice which made me go through some trouble when receiving it at my country.