The book is concerned with the acquisition of English phonology, both segmental and suprasegmental, by learners of English as a second language, as a third language and by speakers of a postcolonial (“new”) variety of English. It focuses on the acquisition process and factors influencing it, based on insights from all three disciplines.

A proper understanding of intelligibility is at the heart of effective pronunciation teaching, and with it, successful teaching of speaking and listening. Far from being an optional 'add-it-on-if-we-have-time' language feature, pronunciation is essential because of its tremendous impact on speech intelligibility. Pronunciation dramatically affects the ability of language learners to make themselves understood and to understand the speech of others. But not all elements of pronunciation are equally important. Some affect intelligibility a great deal, while others do not. With a strong emphasis on classroom practice and how pronunciation teaching can be more effectively approached in different teaching contexts, this book provides an important resource for pronunciation researchers, with a distinctly practical focus. It shows how intelligibility research informs pronunciation teaching within communicative classrooms, enabling language teachers to incorporate intelligibility findings into their teaching. Professionals interested in oral communication, pronunciation, and speech perception will find the book fascinating.

English Pronunciation Instruction: Research-based insights presents recent research on L2 English pronunciation including pedagogical implications and applications, and seeks to bridge the gulf between pronunciation research and teaching practice. The volume’s 15 chapters cover a range of aspects that are central to pronunciation teaching, including the teaching of different segmental and suprasegmental features, teachers’ and learners’ views and practices, types and sources of learners’ errors, feedback and assessment, tools and strategies for pronunciation instruction, reactions towards accented speech, as well as the connection between research and teaching. Chapters offer a fully developed section on pedagogical implications with insightful suggestions for classroom instruction. This format and the variety of topics will be informative for researchers, language teachers, and students interested in English pronunciation, as it explores the diverse challenges learners of different L1 backgrounds face, and also provides research-informed techniques and recommendations on how to cope with them.

This Element focuses on phonetic and phonological development in multilinguals and presents a novel methodological approach to it within Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST). We show how phonetic and phonological development is feature-dependent and inter-connected and how learning experience affects the process.

This edited book presents and discusses theoretical, practical, and research developments in English pronunciation in order to establish evidence-based directions and recommendations for best practices in English speech assessment, research, and training. It features leading pronunciation experts from diverse contexts who share cutting-edge research and valuable insights. The collection consists of six parts. Part 1 introduces the aims, focus, and structure of the book, and describes its intended audience. Part 2 reviews, provides empirical evidence, and offers critical analyses guiding different aspects of English speech assessment. Parts 3 and 4 report empirical findings and research perspectives on the perception and production of English speech. Part 5 shares current practices in phonetic training and their effect on learners and listeners. Part 6 presents theoretical perspectives on the acquisition of phonology in multilinguals.

This book aims to bridge the gap in investigations into the acquisition of phonology from a multilingual perspective. In order to fully understand this process, the editors present state of the art research into third language (L3) phonology as well as future considerations for this field. The individual contributions address limitations apparent in current literature, in terms of methodology and scope, while offering innovative solutions in the study of conceptualization, design and data analysis, and novel application of theoretical frameworks to L3 phonology. The contributions consist of a number of original studies which attempt to address vital research questions regarding a bilingual advantage for subsequent phonological acquisition, the variables that drive phonological transfer at the onset of third language acquisition, the L3 developmental path, and how L3 phonological acquisition affects existing systems. The empirical and theoretical strides made in the study of L3 phonology, provided in this volume, confirm that it is a promising area of inquiry with a growing potential to provide novel insights into the linguistic and cognitive underpinnings of language acquisition. This book was originally published as a special issue of International Journal of Multilingualism.

This handbook is structured in two parts: it provides, on the one hand, a comprehensive (synchronic) overview of the phonetics and phonology (including prosody) of a breadth of Romance languages and focuses, on the other hand, on central topics of research in Romance segmental and suprasegmental phonology, including comparative and diachronic perspectives. Phonetics and phonology have always been a core discipline in Romance linguistics: the wide synchronic variety of languages and dialects derived from spoken Latin is extensively explored in numerous corpus and atlas projects, and for quite a few of these varieties there is also more or less ample documentation of at least some of their diachronic stages. This rich empirical database offers excellent testing grounds for different theoretical approaches and allows for substantial insights into phonological structuring as well as into (incipient, ongoing, or concluded) processes of phonological change. The volume can be read both as a state-of-the-art report of research in the field and as a manual of Romance languages with special emphasis on the key topics of phonetics and phonology.