Sounds Great 1: Low Intermediate Pronunciation for Speakers of English

The instruction begins with the schwa and /I/ vowels, then moves to applying those vowels in unstressed words and syllables. Sentence stress, rhythm, linking, and rising and falling intonation complete the first half of the book. The second half consists of applicable segmental features for beginning students such as past tense verb endings, "-s" endings on verbs, nouns, and contractions, and consonant pairs difficult to distinguish like /r/ and /l/, voiced and voiceless "th," and the voiced palatal affricates. Each chapter is made up of exercises that practice listening, speaking, and reading. Every chapter begins with a listening exercise that has students mark down what they hear from a cassette, and then read back and imitate what they heard. These exercises are followed by pair and group speaking and reading exercises that move from mechanical to meaningful, but only become communicative in the last exercise at the end of each chapter. One nice feature in each of the chapters is the pair activities. These activities are designed to help students discover how accurate their own pronunciation is. Each student has a separate sheet with a different set of information and instructions. The students ask questions, listen, and mark down the responses they hear. The speaker must clearly pronounce the prompted response for the listener to correctly mark it. Then intended responses are compared with marked answers. These exercises, while mechanical, allow students to see how well their own pronunciation is understood and provide opportunities for peer feedback in an indirect and non-threatening way. The other activities center around familiar topics such as the office, the house, city buildings, the calendar, descriptions of people, and leisure activities. Many of the activities are based on simple location questions and answers. While the topics vary from chapter to chapter, the format of the activities remains consistent throughout the text which cuts down on class time used to explain activities. The approach to teaching pronunciation is somewhat inductive. The text explicitly gives general rules such as vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, but it does not spell out more specific rules such as stress patterns for two-syllable compound nouns; rather, each chapter includes sections where students find patterns in and make guided generalizations about the more specific rules. Then they are asked to apply and test these rules in exercises that follow. Rules are learned through practice and familiarization with the English sound system rather than memorization. Sounds Great includes an instructor's manual and audio tape. The instructor's manual includes suggested procedures for the practice activities, answer keys, and a reference list of materials to diagnose students' speech. There is also a list that classifies the practice activities in the student book by grammar points and topic