English Pronunciation in Use Elementary

Pronunciation in Use

by Jonathan Marks

Understand and be understood in English with the best-selling English Pronunciation in Use. Fifty easy-to-use units cover all aspects of pronunciation, including individual sounds, word stress, connected speech and intonation. An additional reference section offers a glossary of specialized terms, help with the pronunciation of numbers and geographical names, and fun exercises on phonemic symbols and minimal pairs. Versions with Audio CDs, supporting each unit with audio material in a range of accents. and with a CD-ROM, are available to purchase separately.

Genres: Textbooks, Linguistics, Nonfiction

166 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2008

About the author

I was born and brought up in Leeds, which is about 60 miles from the sea, but I’ve lived for most of my grown-up life in coastal places – Hastings in England, Nynäshamn in Sweden, and first Gdańsk and now Łeba in Poland. I’ve also lived in the north and the south of Germany.

I always wanted to be a teacher, but my ambitions to be a primary teacher in Britain failed the reality test. Fortunately I found out that there was something called teaching English as a foreign language to adults, and during a summer spent teaching in England, I met some other teachers who told me about a four-week teacher-training course that you could do and where you learned, for example, to hold up an empty coffee jar to illustrate the meaning of ‘There isn’t any coffee left’. Well, needless to say, I signed up for it as soon as I could. It was the distant ancestor of what’s now known as the Celta course, and the month when I did it was the last month before the course fee went up from £90 to £110. That was certainly the best investment I’ve ever made, and I’ve never looked back since.

During the 1980s, International House Hastings provided me with exceptional opportunities for development as a teacher and teacher-trainer. That period also marked the beginning of my association with IATEFL, which has always been, and still is, important to me as an environment for keeping in touch with the wider world of ELT.

In Hastings, too, I spent innumerable evenings in pubs with Tim Bowen, having conversations like this:

J or T: “We should really write a book.”
J or T: “Yeah, we should.”
(pause)
J or T: “Whose round is it?”

Eventually, though, we were galvanised into action by two specific publishing projects, which led to two books for teachers, ‘The Pronunciation Book’ and ‘Inside Teaching’, the former being the ancestor of our pronunciation book for Delta Publishing.

A bit later, in Germany, I was part of a team of people who wrote a coursebook for German-speaking learners, called ‘Bridges’. More recently, I wrote ‘English Pronunciation in Use – Elementary’ (CUP 2007), which I suppose is a product of two long-standing interests: teaching pronunciation and teaching low levels. I’ve also been involved in various capacities in three Polish-English dictionary projects and written various supplementary materials, stuff for the onestopenglish website and so on.

Reviews

[Barack Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

308-English pronunciation in use-Jonathan Marks-Tool-2007

Barack
2021/01/30

" English pronunciation in use ", first published in the UK in 2007. It covers all aspects of English pronunciation, including the human voice, word stress, continuous reading, intonation, and so on.

Jonathan Marks, born in Leeds, UK. He is dedicated to teaching the basics of pronunciation. Representative works: " English pronunciation in use " etc.

Table of Contents
Section A Sounds and spelling
Section B Syllables and words
Section C Phrases, sentences, and grammar
Section D Conversation

" It will be useful if you can record your own voice so that you
can listen to your own pronunciation and hear your progress.
When you are studying individual sounds it is sometimes useful to have a mirror, so that you can
see the shape of your mouth and compare it with the diagrams in the book. ”

Here are actually two good suggestions for practicing pronunciation. The first is to record your own reading and listen to your own recording. Themselves in actual say when, probably attention on the content itself, thereby attend to pronunciation problems. But when we come back to listen to their own recordings, you might obviously be aware of their problem, only first aware of the problem, be possible to correct the problem.

The second suggestion is to look at your mouth shape in the mirror while practicing pronunciation. Because sometimes, the reason why our pronunciation is not accurate is that our mouth shape is wrong.

" There are 26 letters in the English alphabet.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
There are five vowel letters. AEIOU
And there are 21 consonant letters. B CD FGHJKLMNPORSTVWXYZ
But there are more than 40 vowel and consonant sounds in English. ”

Original pronunciation and consonant pronunciation are the basis of pronunciation. If we fail to figure out or confuse the pronunciation of vowels and consonants, then the pronunciation of the whole word must also sound problematic.

" /I:/ is a long sound. Look at the diagram. Listen and then
say the sound. Make your mouth wide, like a smile. Your
tongue touches the sides of your teeth. ”

/I ː/For this sound, open your mouth more clearly. If we want to learn the basic pronunciation of a language, we must first learn its pronunciation. If the mouth shape is wrong and the tongue position is wrong, the pronunciation is prone to errors.

" / I / is a short sound. Look at the diagram. Listen and then
say the sound. Make your mouth a bit less wide than for
/ i /. Your tongue is a bit further back in your mouth than
for / I :/. ”

The sound of /ɪ/, the opening is not so obvious, the mouth is like a passage, let the airflow through this passage.

" /U:/ is a long sound. Look at the diagram. Listen and then
say the sound. Make your lips into a tunnel shape.
Your tongue is a long way back in your mouth. ”

/uː/ is a long vowel, the pronunciation is more exaggerated. We distinguish between long vowels and short vowels. But in fact, in terms of the way of pronunciation, perhaps it is more appropriate to call loose vowels and tight vowels. It means that the mouth is opened more open, or pressed tighter.

" /U/ is a short sound. Look at the diagram. Listen and then
say the sound. Your tongue is not so far back as for /u:/. ”

/ʊ/ is a short vowel, short and powerful. To understand this pronunciation, you probably need to be gentle.

" /A:/ is a long sound. Look at the diagram. Listen and then
say the sound. Open your mouth wide. ”

/ Ɑ ː / this sound, mouth open than larger, in fact, is a more exaggerated mouth. Maybe the Chinese don't like such exaggerated pronunciation and think it is a bit artificial, but we have to do such exaggerated pronunciation.

" /A/ is a short sound. Look at the diagram. Listen and then
say the sound. Open your mouth wide. ”

The sound of /ʌ/ is faster and shorter, it is a very crisp sound, and the mouth shape is not so exaggerated.

" /O/ is a short sound. Look at the diagram. Listen and say
the sound. Round your lips a little. The front of your
tongue is low and towards the back of your mouth. ”

The sound /ɒ/ is also short and powerful. The pronunciation is swift and violent, not muddled and straightforward.

" /O:/ is a long sound. Look at the diagram. Listen and say
the sound. Round your lips more than for /o/. ”

/ɔː/ This sound has a longer tone and a more exaggerated mouth shape. There is a clear action of pursing his lips.

" /E/ is a short sound. Look at the diagram. Listen and say
the sound. Open your mouth quite wide. ”

The sound /e/ is a short vowel. The mouth shape is not so exaggerated, and the lowering of the jaw is not so obvious.

" /Z/ is a short sound. Look at the diagram. Listen and say
the sound. Open your mouth wide. ”

Although /æ/ is also a short vowel, the mouth shape is more exaggerated, the tongue falls more obviously, and the lower jaw drops more obviously.

" /S:/ is a long sound. Look at the diagram. Listen and say
the sound, To make this sound, your mouth, and your
tongue should be very relaxed. ”

/ɜː/ is a long vowel. This long vowel is not the same as before. This sound does not require a very exaggerated mouth shape, but a very relaxed tone.

Monophonic : / ɑ ː/ /ɔː/ /ɜː/ / i ː/ /uː/ /æ/ /ʌ/ /ɒ/ /ə/ /ɪ/ /ʊ/ /e/.
Double vowels: / eɪ / / aɪ / / ɔɪ / / əu / /au/ / eə / / ɪə / / uə /.

[Shima Mahmoudi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been in love with the british accent eversince I can remember and this book is a great resource for learing and teaching.

[Ana Rodríguez · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've devoured this book from start to finish. It's awesome! Really well structured. The sounds are presented by pairs with the same mouth position (one sound is made by vibration with the throat and the other one is not, it's more "silent"). That way you can easily grasp de difference and similarities of sounds, you learn to pronounce and discriminate them in your listening practice. At the end he presents the basics of English intonation, which is extremely important too. It's a very useful book, It prepares you to face the two following books "Pronunciation in Use" Intermediate and Advanced. I want to thank the author for this brilliant project, which has helped so many of us to speak and begin to understand the language. These things rarely are taught in schools, focused primarily in writing exercises and grammar, which someway obstructs our path to fluency. I've been thinking these days about all this, as Mr. Marks wonder himself: "how can formal instruction help you most effectively, as opposed to interfering with the learning process?" That's a really good question. How can we achieve fluency in a language? With formal or informal learning?

[Suellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

How English Pronunciation works in English language learning?

[Su Wai]

I would like to learn English Pronunciation.

[Tippawan Kopanklang]

Nice