This self-study book takes the reader on a journey of discovery into the areas of pronunciation, phonetics, and phonology; places where students have often lost their way – and their motivation. The book is structured in the way people learn: Examples and immediate practice in the spoken and written medium illustrate and consolidate newly acquired linguistic knowledge, improving and strengthening listening and pronunciation skills, and raising language awareness. Since hard work without motivating support is difficult to sustain, the relative importance and usefulness of the different phonetic phenomena are explained, and pictures, cartoons, jokes, old and new limericks and dialogues are used to raise and maintain students' interest and help them to remember important distinctions in a complex subject matter which is not always immediately accessible to the uninitiated. As the table of contents reveals, the book has a highly modularized structure, which is suited to selective remedial practice, and helps in the revision of particular problem areas. There is a great variety of exercises – ear-training, discrimination exercises, problem solving, phonetic transcription, etc. – for beginners and advanced students. Solutions are provided at the end of the book, and there is an index for quick reference to technical terms. The file structure of the CD-ROM facilitates quick access to any exercise in any order.
