Exploring English Phonetics

Book excerpt: Exploring English Phonetics is conceived as a meeting point of the diverse perspectives, approaches and interests of scholars working in the field of English Phonetics worldwide. The focus of the volume is on the topics in the domain of language varieties, mutual language influences, and also on issues pertaining to the research, study, and teaching of English to speakers from other language backgrounds. Authors raise a number of novel, motivating and noteworthy questions, relevant from the point of view of either phonetic research or phonetic training and EFL teaching. These questions cover a wide range of phonetic topics: the nature of vowels and consonants in several dominating varieties of English, the phenomena of connected speech and the nature of intonation, issues in the methodology of phonetic research, problems encountered by speakers of other languages striving to acquire English pronunciation, and attitudes to different native and non-native varieties of English. Despite such a broad variety of topics, the volume offers a unifying approach to the study of speech and puts forward intriguing results gained by original research. Whatever their focus and sample size, most chapters deal with the English spoken and learned by speakers of other languages, thus highlighting both the current status of English as the language of global communication, and the international orientation of this volume.