PronPack is an award-winning collection resource books to help teachers focus on English pronunciation in class. Accent for listeners , alongside Word Recognition for Listeners and Connected Speech for Listeners , is part of the Pronunciation for Listening series. These three books provide background reading plus teaching ideas and materials for dealing in class with listening to spoken English. The main objective is to help learners improve their listening skills. These pocketbook-style volumes are user-friendly, with short well signposted chapters providing maximum accessibility for the busy teacher. Section A contains 12 short chapters introducing key themes relating to the topic of accent in language learning. You can read this section straight through for a complete overview of the issues related to accent. On the other hand, the chapters are free-standing, meaning that you can dip into them at separate times if you prefer.

The topics include what accents are, how they change, how they relate to pronunciation, and how they may feature in the teaching of English. Section B looks at regional accents around the world and the key ways in which they differ from one another. The first chapter in the section explains what regional accent variation is, and the chapters which follow each provides a brief overview of accents of English in a specific area of the globe. The final chapter looks at second-language accents of English. Section C outlines some of the most significant pronunciation features which differ across accents. This section of the book looks in more detail at those specific features of pronunciation which stand out as being variable across accents. Most of these features relate to consonant or vowel sounds, since these are both noticeable and relatively easy to describe without requiring too much theoretical background knowledge. Section D provides practical material for accent awareness raising activities in language classrooms.

There is material for 24 lessons, each raising awareness of a specific pronunciation feature which varies across accents. Each lesson is based around a short rhyming text containing multiple examples of the target feature, followed by explanatory notes. The actual lesson material for taking into the classroom, including audios and images, can be freely downloaded from the support website for this book. The other books in the PronPack collection are: PronPack 1: Pronunciation Workouts - a collection of extended choral drill activities. PronPack 2: Pronunciation Puzzles - a collection of puzzles and game-like activities. PronPack 3: Pronunciation Pairworks - a collection of communicative practice activities. PronPack 4: Pronunciation Poems - a collection of poems, raps and chants to highlight different pronunciation points. PronPack 5: Pronunciation of English for Spanish Speakers - a collection of activities working on the kinds of difficulties experienced by Spanish-speaking learners.

PronPack 6: Pronunciation of English for Brazilian Learners - a collection of activities working on the kinds of difficulties experienced by learners whose first language is Brazilian Portuguese. PronPack: Connected Speech for Listeners - background tips plus lesson ideas and materials for teaching English connected speech, with a focus on improving listening fluency. PronPack: Word Recognition for Listeners - background tips plus lesson ideas and materials to help learners develop their ability to recognise words in the spoken form, including a focus on word stress and affixation. PronPack: The Minimal Pair Collection - a complete bank of ideas and material for focusing on English phonemes and phoneme contrasts, with extensive classroom-ready support material.