Modern English Pronunciation Practice [antikvár]

Introduction Many teachers of pronunciation find that they have to waste time writing exercises on the blackboard, or dictating them. Even those whose students use a textbook come up against this difficulty. It is not the fault of the textbooks: the fact is that a textbook on pronunciation would be too voluminous if it included comprehensive exercises. The aim of this book is to provide a wide range of exercises, so that the teacher whose students have the book can concentrate on pronunciation without devoting precious time to writing out lists and sentences on the blackboard. The saving in time allows more concentrated and extensive practice. In these exercises, the various sounds ('phonemes') of English are identified, for quick reference, by means of the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet. However, the word-lists and reading matter have not been transcribed into phonetic symbols. Various teachers use various systems of transcription, and if the system used in a book is not that used by a particular teacher, the change from one system to another may be confusing to most of his students, especially in the early stages. The exercises in this book are concerned with the ' pure' vowels, the diphthongs, and the consonants of English, in that order. In the sections on the vowels and diphthongs, the 'First practice' consists (nearly always) of single-syllable words; in ' Later practice' are given words of more than one syllable, containing vowels or diphthongs other than that under study. Then come, when appropriate, ' Word-contrasts' such as ' sheep' and' ship or 'nut' and 'not'. Finally, there is some reading matter in which the particular vowel or diphthong occurs frequently. It should be noted that in the reading matter on the neutral vowel ('schwa') all the weak syllables contain only this vowel, or no vowel at all. In the sections on the consonants, the first exercise deals with the consonant generally (more or less as 'principal member of the phoneme') and there is no exercise for later practice; there follow exercises on word-contrasts and other matters of interest, such as iii