Description

Phonetics in the Classroom: A Handbook for Beginners is a handbook that will prove invaluable to all students and teachers of Linguistics, and will also be useful to those working in other, connected fields. The aim of this handbook is to provide students with practical skills and a conceptual framework to do further work in phonetics. It will give training in the production, perception, physiological and acoustic description, and IPA transcription of the speech sounds used in the languages of the world. The main function of the handbook is to provide the essential background for beginners so that they can be equipped for further work in phonetics. The book introduces students to the sounds of languages in general while at the same focusing on the sounds of spoken English, with emphases on the description of consonants and vowels, the stress patterns of English, and the use and functions of English intonation. Throughout, hundreds of examples are given from the world's languages although there is an obvious concentration on English.