The Handbook of English Pronunciation is a collection of 28 chapters with various approaches to English pronunciation. As we have worked on the Handbook, we have been strongly aware that we could have doubled the number of chapters and still not fully done justice to the overall topic. The Handbook is intended for applied linguists and for teachers, for those who are experts and for those who are not. In applied linguistics, a growing number of researchers are examining pronunciation and its relationship to areas such as speech intelligibility, language testing, speech recognition and text-to-speech, pragmatics, and social factors impacting language acquisition. Indeed, researchers in any area of applied linguistics increasingly find the need to take phonetic and phonological form into account. They may not be experts in pronunciation, yet still they find a need to understand the forms and meanings of English pronunciation and they need to know where to find further information when they need it. Beyond directly practical chapters, many authors of more research-oriented chapters have added implications of research for teaching.

The handbook is also written for teachers who need immediately practical chapters about the place of pronunciation in their classrooms. They also need a wider context for how English pronunciation is structured, why it is so varied, and how it changes depending on discourse context. This means that the handbook includes chapters that are important in understanding the role of pronunciation in language description and analysis, and chapters that are more obviously relevant to teachers. A single book that tries to meet the needs of both groups is a challenge, but it is also necessary for a field with growing interest both for the classroom and for research.

The handbook is necessary because pronunciation is a topic that will not go away. Pronunciation influences all research into, and teaching of, spoken language, which must take account of how English is pronounced to account for what happens elsewhere in spoken language. Discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociocultural analyses of language, English as an international language, reading, acquisition, and ultimate attainment, all must reckon with pronunciation as an important variable. Those primarily interested in other areas may not be experts in pronunciation, yet still find a need to understand the forms and meanings of English pronunciation and where to find further information when they need it. Not only is pronunciation important in relation to other areas of language but it is important in its own right.

A knowledge of English pronunciation is also valuable by itself as an area of study. Even though a native-like accent is impossible for most adult L2 learners, pronunciation remains the gateway to spoken intelligibility for second language learners because of its close ties to social meanings within language. It also helps distinguish dialects, formal and informal registers of speech, and is influential in distinguishing social standing within speech networks.

In English language teaching, pronunciation is today on the ascendancy. As a subject area for language teaching, it plummeted from being central to falling into disfavor in the 1960s and 1970s when research confronted teachers with the uncomfortable fact that it was impossible, or at least extraordinarily unlikely, for second language learners to achieve a native-like accent. Additionally, the rise of communicative language teaching and its emphasis on fluency was a poor fit for the 1960s accuracy-oriented exercises of pronunciation teaching. As a result, pronunciation was often ignored in the classroom, with the hope that it would somehow take care of itself if teachers worked on helping learners achieve communicative competence.

Unfortunately, this hope was overly optimistic. Pronunciation did not take care of itself. The two choices of “we need to have native-like pronunciation” versus “it’s not worth working on this if we can’t be native” have been increasingly shown by research and practice to be a false dichotomy. Hinofotis and Bailey (1981) were among the first to argue that pronunciation played a kind of gate-keeping function in speech, in that speakers who had not achieved a threshold level of pronunciation adequacy in the second language would not, and could not, be adequate communicators no matter how good their fluency, listening, grammar, and vocabulary. The resurrection of the notion of intelligibility (Abercrombie 1949) as both a more reasonable and more realistic goal for pronunciation achievement began with Smith and Nelson’s (1985) examination of intelligibility among World Englishes. Their classificatory scheme of intelligibility was mirrored in many ways by research done by James Flege, and Murray Munro and Tracey Derwing (1995) and has had a tremendous effect not only on research into pronunciation learning but also in the way it is approached in the classroom (see Levis 2005).

Even though teachers throughout the world recognize the importance of pronunciation, they have repeatedly reported feeling inadequate in addressing this area of language teaching (Burgess and Spencer 2000; Breitkreutz, Derwing, and Rossiter 2002; Macdonald 2002). As a result of their confusion and lack of confidence, most simply do not address pronunciation. While a full solution to this lack of confidence would require many changes in professional preparation both for teachers and applied linguistics researchers, a reliable, easily available source of information that reflects current knowledge of the field is one important step.

Throughout this Handbook, we learn how an understanding of English pronunciation is essential for any applied linguist or language teacher, from understanding the historical and often unusual development of English pronunciation over 1000 years, to descriptions of the diversity of Englishes and their pronunciations in the world today, to the ways that features of English pronunciation are best described, to pronunciation’s role in the construction and the analysis of discourse, to patterns of first and second language acquisition, and to the social attitudes connected to differences in accent. Even this wide range of topics is too narrow. English pronunciation carries social meanings and is subject to social judgments, it reflects pragmatic meanings, it is intimately connected to the expression of information structure, and it is essential to speech recognition and text-to-speech technology. Pronunciation cannot be ignored.

The structure of the Handbook includes six general areas: History, Description, Discourse, Varieties, Acquisition, and Teaching. The first area tells us of the history of English pronunciation. English has a very interesting history of its pronunciation, going back more than 1000 years. Jeremy Smith provides a long view of how English has changed, looking at residualisms in varieties of English and focusing especially on three major changes: the phonemicization of voiced fricatives, the effect of Breaking on vowel changes, and the Great Vowel Shift. Each of these remains important in today’s Englishes, showing that history is not just the past but influences today’s Englishes as well. In the second chapter in this section, Lynda Mugglestone examines the social meanings of accent from the eighteenth century until today. The rise of Received Pronunciation (RP) as a marker of education and class both included and excluded speakers from the social power structure and reinforced social class barriers as RP spread throughout the power structure of Great Britain. The chapter is a fascinating look at how important “talking proper” (Mugglestone 2007) was and how even now the values associated with accent remain powerful. Finally, John Murphy and Amanda Baker look at the history of pronunciation teaching from 1850 till now. They identify four overlapping waves of practice, with a fifth wave perhaps in its early stages. Their meticulously researched history of pronunciation teaching will provide a framework for researchers and will help teachers understand where pedagogical approaches originated.

The second section of the Handbook is the bread and butter of pronunciation, the description of the structural units that make up the widely varying elements of the system. David Deterding provides a look at the segmentals of English, focusing his attention on the consonant and vowel sounds. Adam Brown looks at what happens to those segmentals when they are combined into syllables and how certain patterns are well formed and others are not. His discussion of phonotactics is important for anyone looking at acquisition since well-formed structures in English syllables are not always well formed in other languages. Anne Cutler looks at the ever-important but often misunderstood topic of lexical stress. An expert in how English speakers perceive stress and the signals they attend to, Cutler argues that the prosodic and segmental features of lexical stress are redundant and that listeners primarily attend to segmental cues. Ee Ling Low describes English rhythm from a cross-variety standpoint. She looks at how assumptions of stress-timed rhythm are and are not justified and what recent research on rhythmic variation in different varieties of world Englishes tells us about English rhythm and its place in pronunciation teaching. John M. Levis and Anne Wichmann look at the significant uses of pitch to communicate meaning in their chapter on intonation. Intonation in English is one of the oldest topics to be addressed from an applied viewpoint, yet it remains one of the topics where the gap between modern linguistic descriptions and applied linguistic work is widest. Levis and Wichmann describe newer approaches and the ways in which intonation communicates meaning.

The next section looks at research into how pronunciation behaves at the discourse level. Most research still is done at the sound, word, and sentence level, but discourse affects pronunciation in special ways that are important for both researchers and teachers. Ghinwa Alameen and John M. Levis provide an overview of a much-neglected topic in research, Connected Speech Processes. Comprised of topics such as linking, epenthesis, deletion, reduction, and combinations of these processes, the pronunciation of words in discourse often is dramatically different from citation forms. Anne Wichmann looks at the functions played by English intonation in discourse, looking at the examples of please-requests, information structure, interaction management, and attitudinal meaning. Beatrice Szczepek Reed examines the behavior of prosody in discourse, especially the role of speech rhythm in managing interaction. Many aspects of communication are not tied to single phonological features but rather clusters of features. Finally, Ron Thomson looks at the meta-category of fluency and its relationship to pronunciation. Often thought to be directly related to some aspects of pronunciation, fluency is instead indirectly related to pronunciation but remains a topic that may be important for teaching.

The next section looks at the pronunciation of varieties of English. Initially, we hoped that the writers here would describe their varieties in terms of the international phonetic alphabet, believing that such a description would serve to highlight comparisons. Unfortunately, this proved to be much more difficult than we thought. Different traditions seem strongly entrenched in different areas of the English-speaking world, and each makes sense within its own native environment. Wells’ (1982) use of key words, e.g., the GOAT vowel) often served as a unifying descriptive apparatus. As a result, each chapter has its own idiosyncrasies, but each is also very accessible. Each may require, however, greater familiarity with the IPA chart, especially to the different vowel symbols not often seen in descriptions of English. In addition, each general variety, such as Australian/New Zealand English, refers to a wide variety of regional and social dialects. Within the page limits, we asked authors not to focus on similarities within dialects, but rather to talk about socially significant pronunciations. The result is a catalogue of the richness of each variety.

Charles Boberg describes the pronunciation of North American English. A Canadian, Boberg is particularly well qualified to describe both Canadian and US pronunciations and to make sure that the dominance of US pronunciation does not overshadow the importance of Canadian English. Laurie Bauer (from New Zealand) provides the same kind of balance to the description of Australian/New Zealand English, demonstrating how the differences in the varieties were influenced by their earliest settlement patterns and differing immigration patterns. Clive Upton provides an abundant description of modern-day British English pronunciation, including not only traditional RP but the geographic and social variety that defines English pronunciation in Great Britain and Ireland. Looking at South African English (the only variety seemingly without an -ing/-in’ variation), Ian Bekker and Bertus Van Rooy describe fascinating L1 and L2 varieties of English and their connection to South Africa’s social and historical development. As interesting and important as the native varieties of English are, nativized varieties of English have their own pronunciation patterns. Pramod Pandey’s description of Indian English looks at perhaps the best described and most influential of these new Englishes. Like native varieties, Indian English has its own abundant regional and social variation. Finally, Cecil Nelson and Seong-Yoon Kang look at pronunciation through a World Englishes lens, giving a historical overview of a World Englishes view of English, and especially the role of pronunciation. In doing so, they demonstrate clear differences in approach between World Englishes approach and that of English as a Lingua Franca.

The next section is brief with only two chapters. It addresses the acquisitional issues for English pronunciation. Marilyn Vihman gives a state-of-the-art review of how English pronunciation is acquired by children as an L1. For those used to reading about L2 learning, this chapter will be eye-opening. For L2 pronunciation, Pavel Trofimovich, Sara Kennedy, and Jennifer Foote overview the important variables affecting L2 pronunciation development and provide questions for further research. The long-running debate about the differences between L1 and L2 acquisition has, by and large, not been strongly held for pronunciation learning. These two chapters should serve to show how distinct the two processes are.

The final section of the Handbook is the most directly relevant to teaching. In it, most papers address, explicitly or implicitly, questions of priorities and questions of students’ cognitive engagement with pronunciation learning. Given limited time, which elements of pronunciation are most important and how should such decisions be made? Murray Munro and Tracey Derwing bring their considerable expertise to bear on how research insights into intelligibility can influence the teaching of pronunciation with an examination of current practice. Beth Zielinski looks at another issue in teaching, the long-running segmental/supra-segmental debate. The debate centers on the question of which is more important in the classroom, especially in situations where there is little time available for pronunciation teaching. Zielinski argues that the underlying assumption of the debate, that it is possible to separate segmentals and supra-segmentals, is faulty, and that both are essential. Graeme Couper brings a multidisciplinary approach to classroom research to bear on questions of teaching. He looks at what second language acquisition, social theories of learning, L2 speech research, and Cognitive Linguistics say in developing an approach to L2 pronunciation learning that is not defined primarily by what is currently done in the classroom.

In the next chapter, Robin Walker and Wafa Zoghbor describe an influential and sometime controversial approach to teaching English pronunciation, that of English as a Lingua Franca. This approach is based on Jenkins (2000) in which two NNSs of English are in communication with each other (an overwhelmingly common occurrence in the world today) and what kinds of pronunciation features are required for them to be mutually intelligible. The approach was developed by Walker (2010) and is quite distinct from those pursued in most ESL and EFL contexts. In Intonation in Research and Practice: The Importance of Metacognition, Marnie Reed and Christian Michaud look at teaching intonation from a new perspective, that of metacognition. Intonation, even when it is taught, tends to focus on production, but the authors identify a difficulty with this approach. Students may successfully produce intonation in the classroom without understanding its communicative importance. As a result, they are unlikely to ever make what they have produced part of their own speech. Laura Sicola and Isabelle Darcy examine one of the most challenging yet recommended approaches to teaching pronunciation, the integration of pronunciation with other language skills. Wayne Dickerson, in the next chapter, argues for the importance of prediction in teaching pronunciation. Dickerson argues that predictive skills must be as important as perceptive and productive skills, and that predictive skills have a particular strength in empowering learners in pronunciation learning. Finally, Rebecca Hincks addresses technology, an area that is sure to grow and become even more influential in teaching pronunciation. She explains how speech technology works and explores how technology can be used to help learn pronunciation without and with automatic feedback, how it can evaluate pronunciation, and how it can provide automated speaking practice.

Single-volume handbooks are popular as reference sources. They offer a focused treatment on specialized topics that have a variety of interrelated topics that teachers and researchers are likely to understand inadequately. In an increasingly specialized profession, most teachers and researchers understand a few applied linguistics topics well, but there are many other topics with which they have only a passing acquaintance. English pronunciation is more likely than most topics to fit into the second category.

In summary, this Handbook of English Pronunciation is meant to provide:

• a historical understanding of the development of English pronunciation, the social role of accent, and the ways in which pronunciation has been taught over time;
• a description of some of the major varieties of English pronunciation and the social significance of pronunciation variants in those varieties;
• a description of the elements of English pronunciation, from sounds to syllables to word stress to rhythm to intonation;
• an examination of how discourse affects the pronunciation of segments and the meanings of supra-segmental features, as well as a discussion of pronunciation’s connection to fluency;
• a discussion of how English pronunciation is acquired both in first and second language contexts and the variables affecting acquisition; and
• a selection of chapters that help to frame essential issues about how teaching pronunciation is connected to research and to the spread of technology.

One of the best things about editing this handbook has been learning that many of the things that we thought we knew were mistaken. Our authors come from many countries and most of the continents, and many of them we had not had the pleasure of working with before starting this project. It is clear that brilliant work on English pronunciation is being done by extraordinarily talented and interesting researchers and teachers throughout the world. By bringing them together in one volume, we hope that you, the readers, will find many new and provocative ways to think about English pronunciation, and that you will find the handbook to be as interesting as we have in putting it together.

REFERENCES

1. Abercrombie, D. 1949. Teaching pronunciation. ELT Journal (3)5: 113–122.
2. Breitkreutz, J., Derwing, T.M., and Rossiter, M.J. 2002. Pronunciation teaching practices in Canada. TESL Canada Journal 19: 51–61.
3. Burgess, J., and Spencer, S. 2000. Phonology and pronunciation in integrated language teaching and teacher education. System 28(2): 191–215.
4. Hinofotis, F. and Bailey, K. 1981. American undergraduates’ reactions to the communication skills of foreign teaching assistants. In: TESOL '80: Building Bridges: Research and Practice in Teaching English as a Second Language, J. Fisher, M. Clarke, and J. Schachter (eds.), 120–133, Washington, DC: TESOL.
5. Jenkins, J. 2000. The Phonology of English as an International Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
6. Levis, J. (ed.). 2005. Reconceptualizing pronunciation in TESOL: intelligibility, identity, and World Englishes.  TESOL Quarterly 39(3).
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8. Mugglestone, L. 2007. Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as a Social Symbol, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
9. Munro, M. and Derwing, T. 1995. Foreign accent, comprehensibility, and intelligibility in the speech of second language learners. Language Learning 45: 73–97.
10. Smith, L. and Nelson, C. 1985. International intelligibility of English: directions and resources. World Englishes 4(3): 333–342.
11. Walker, R. 2010. Teaching the Pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
12. Wells, J.C. 1982. Accents of English, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.