Customer Reviews

Tips for Teaching Pronunciation: A Practical Approach (with Audio CD)

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Most books on pronunciation fall into two camps: textbooks with lots of activities and exercises aimed at nonnative speakers, or teacher resource books that tend to be highly theoretical and descriptive but don't offer much in the way of useful activities for the classroom. Thankfully, this book really breaks the mold. I borrowed a copy from another teacher, intending to copy just a few pages, but when I found myself mentally tagging virtually every page in the book, I realized that I would need to buy the whole book for myself. Never again will I scratch my head wondering how to teach any feature of NAE pronunciation in a clear and engaging way. This book is FULL of lesson ideas that are spelled out step-by-step, complete with worksheets and many, many examples. The explanations for teachers are the clearest I've ever come across. If I were allowed to have only three books to use in planning fun, interactive pronunciation classes, they would be Mark Hancock's Pronunciation Games (Cambridge Copy Collection), Martin Hewings' Pronunciation Practice Activities Book and Audio CD Pack: A Resource Book for Teaching English Pronunciation (Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers), and Linda Lane's Tips for Teaching Pronunciation: A Practical Approach (with Audio CD). The latter covers all of the features a teacher really needs to understand (specific phonemes, suprasegmentals, the works) while also converting all of that information/description into ***ready-to-be-deployed classroom activities***. That's where most teacher resource books in this particular specialty fail miserably. In fact, this teacher reference contains even more imaginative classroom activities than Lane's own textbook series Focus on Pronunciation 1 (with 2 Student Audio CDs) (2nd Edition). Usually it's the reverse: the textbooks contain all the fun activity ideas while the teacher reference books are too distant and "deep" to be of much practical day-to-day use. As a working teacher in constant need of ideas for what to do in the classroom, I know which kind of book is more valuable to me. Let the grad students and academics have all the other books about pronunciation teaching. I'll take this one--it's worth a dozen of those.