PronPack: Connected Speech for Listeners

PronPack is an award-winning collection resource books to help teachers focus on English pronunciation in class. Connected Speech for Listeners provides background tips plus a wealth of teaching ideas and materials for dealing in class with the pronunciation of natural spoken English. The main objective is to help learners improve their listening skills. This pocketbook-style volume is user-friendly, with short well signposted chapters providing maximum accessibility for the busy teacher. The book is currently available in print from Amazon (.com, .com.au, .ca, .de, .es, .fr, .it, .co.uk) and also in the UK from BEBC, and in Greece/Cyprus from DES. It will soon be available as an ebook.

The main body of this book consists of three sections. Section A is background reading. Sections B and C contain practical teaching ideas and materials.
Section A contains 18 practical tips with advice and suggestions about how to teach pronunciation for listening. Reading this section straight through provides a complete overview of the issues involved in teaching pronunciation for listening. On the other hand, the tips are independent and self-contained so readers can dip into them in a different order, as and when they feel the need.

Section B contains materials for 6 lessons each focusing on one of the main features of connected speech. These are suitable for introducing the general concepts, which are then revisited in context in the lessons in Section C. They may be used in a section of a lesson especially set aside for work on pronunciation. Many teachers will also find them useful for self-study, to learn about or remind themselves of the fundamentals of connected speech.

Section C contains the main body of teaching materials and ideas in this book. They consist of 18 lessons exploring pronunciation for listening, organised grammatically. Grammar provides a natural organising principle for the lessons because so many features of connected speech emerge in given combinations of function words which correlate to grammatical structures. However, the main reason for using grammar is practical: it imposes a logical ordering on a subject matter which can often appear random and confusing. Perhaps most important of all, it suggests ways in which pronunciation for listening can be integrated with the grammar covered in a teaching syllabus.

The book is supported by a full range of resources both in the endmatter of the volume itself (Section D) and on the support website pronpack.com. These include audio files and classroom-friendly versions of materials presented in the book, which can be either printed or projected in face to face contexts, or shared in online teaching. There are also videos available for many of the materials in the book on the PronPack YouTube channel.