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Pronunciation Plus: Practice Through Interaction

Article · March 2000

DOI: 10.1002/j.1949-3533.2000.tb00229.x

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Pronunciation Plus is a North American
version of a British pronunciation text .
Designed for intermediate-level students and
above, the book successfully combines pro-
nunciation practice with meaningful and
communicative tasks, an ideal long advo-
cated but rarely achieved in pronunciation
textbooks. Pronunciation Plus consists of an
introductory lesson plus 60 lessons or units in
eight ca tegories: Vowels, Consona nts,
Consonant Clusters, Stress and Rhythm,
Sounds in Connected Speech, Intonation,
Sounds and Grammar, and Pronouncing
Written Words. Approximately 60% of the
book focuses on segmental topics and 40%
on suprasegmentals.
38 TESOL Journal
Pronunciation Plus:
Practice Through
Interaction
Martin Hewings and
Sharon Goldstein.
Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998
Pp. vi + 146.
Reviewed by
John M. Levis
Pronunciation Plus is an unusual book for
those who are used to traditional ways of
teaching pronunciation. Minimal pair drills
are infrequent, there is very little explanation,
phonetic symbols are used but not empha-
sized, and words and phrases introduced in
mechanical repetition exercises are always
recycled in subsequent communicative
exercises. Units (lessons) include mechani-
cal (listening or repetition) and interactive
exercises, usually numbering between 8
and 15 exercises per unit.
Pronunciation Plus appears to be for
teachers who are not technically knowl-
edgeable about pronunciation but are
familiar with a communicative approach
to teaching. The authors attempt a very
difficult task—providing lessons and
activities that do not depend on prior
knowledge of teachers and students but
will likely lead to significant progress in
clear pronunciation. Knowledgeable
teachers, of course, will find that the text
does not go far enough on certain top-
ics; but this is a minor weakness
because experienced pronunciation
teachers can easily supplement the text.
One significant strength of the book
includes the use of ordinary words and
phrases for repetition activities and the recy-
cling of this vocabulary in interactive activi-
ties. This commonsense approach is a
welcome change from pronunciation text-
books that too frequently include uncommon
or strange vocabulary, thus limiting commu-
nicative usefulness.
Another strength of the book is its breadth
and the relative independence of individual
lessons. The independent lessons mean that
teachers and students can decide the topics to
cover and the order in which to cover them, a
flexibility that is sure to be welcome in many
teaching contexts. The breadth of the book
means that there is material available for
important topics that are usually neglected.
The material on the connection between
spelling and sound in Part 8, for example,
provides sophisticated predictive rules in a
concise and nonthreatening way, thus teach-
ing students that spelling can be a help rather
than a hindrance.
Importantly, the book directly addresses
acceptable variations in North American
English. The vowels in cot and caught are a
case in point. The authors accurately state
that some speakers (e.g., from New York)
use both vowels, whereas others (e.g., from
Califor nia) us e only the f irst vowel .
Complexities of the dialect variations are
descri bed more fully in the Teacher’s
Manual, but the New York/California simpli-
fication is skillfully exploited to raise student
aware ness of mul tiple models of North
American English.
The book is not without weaknesses. The
authors are overly optimistic when they say
that “many of the tasks can be used by stu-
dents working on their own with a cassette
recorder” (p. vi). Students may certainly
practice on their own, but the answers to the
exercises are in the Teacher’s Manual .
Throughout the book, in fact, there is a mini-
malist approach to providing explanations
and answers. Although this approach is often
successful, it makes students quite dependent
on the teacher or the Teacher’s Manual. I
found myself frequently wishing explana-
tions had been given in the text, since it is not
guaranteed that a teacher will have or use a
Teacher’s Manual.
Finally, the book’s description of Rhythm
and Prominence was a bit muddled, a sur-
prise in such a well-crafted book. Rhythm in
the text appears to be primarily related to
word-stress, whereas Prominence has a dou-
ble meaning, including the idea of phrase
rhythm and phrase focus, with little help
given to separate the two concepts. Given the
importance of rhythm and focus in English, it
would have been helpful to present these top-
ics more transparently.
Despite its few weaknesses, Pronuncia -
tion Plus is an important and very useable
book. I hope that it is a forerunner of many
more pronunciation texts that successfully
bridge the gap between controlled practice
and actual communication.
Author
John M. Levis is assistant professor of
ESL at North Carolina State University, in
the United States. His interests include the
integration of pronunciation into oral com -
munication curricula.

dom to students in the learning process. Even

New Vistas is an outstanding series of
ESL classroom texts utilizing most of the
principles of the communicative language
teaching approach. As suggested by the
series title, New Vistas offers a comprehen-
sive learning experience well suited to inde-
pendent, persistent language students.
Because the communicative language
teaching approach emphasizes the creation
of an interactive, learner-oriented classroom,
with the role of the teacher mostly relegated
to that of a facilitator, students, to some
extent, can decide what they want to learn.
The New Vistas program is also designed to
be as communicative and multicultural as
possible. Each book includes a story involv-
ing multiethnic characters facing real-life sit-
uations, to which students can relate their
own everyday lives. It is tailor-made for
U.S. classrooms, where the ethnic composi-
tion is diverse.
New Vistas, Student though grammar teaching is secondary in
communicative language learning, New
Book 1 Vistas provides students with some grammar
and structure training in the workbook and
H. Douglas Brown, with through online activities, including grammar
Anne Albarelli-Siegfried, Federico exercises, visiting different assigned Web
Salas, Alice Savage, and sites, and writing e-mails. Some parts of the
Masoud Shafiei. assignments are even graded through an
Upper Saddle River, NJ: online automatic gradebook. The e-mail
Prentice Hall Regents, 1999 activities, in particular, allow students to
Pp. vi + 138. practice their new language skills. Audio
training is implemented in every unit. For
example, students someti mes l isten to
Reviewed by recorded conversations in order to gather
information to complete the required tasks.
Sophia Wong
This review focuses on Student Book 1—
the second book after the introduct ory
Getting Started volume in the series. Several
specific features in the book identify it as a
New Vistas is a five-level, communicatively oriented text: Pair or group
integrated-skills series writ-
ten for prebeginning- to
high in t erme d iat e-l evel
a du lt an d you ng adu lt
learners of English, grouped by hetero-
geneous or homogeneous linguistic or
cul tura l b ackgrou nds . The ser ies
comes with student books, teachers’
resource manuals, workbooks, and
audio programs at each level. Students
bui ld their compet ence and profi-
ciency step-by-step through listening,
speaking, reading, and writing activi-
ties, centering on t opics of social
communication, such as meeting peo-
ple, giving out personal information,
and daily routines.
Apart from some familiar exercises
(e.g., cloze passages, matching, open-
ended questions), the workbook is
unique in other ways. It includes
databased tasks that require students
to fill out personal information and
proofreading activities that are not
commonly seen in other texts. These
activities give more individual free-

Spring 2000 39

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