An important purpose of the course is to explain the standard English accent in England to English learners. Simply put,this book is intended to help Chinese learners to speak English with a good pronunciation. But what is a good pronunciation? A good pro...[继续阅读]

    Present-day English has a great variety of accents since it is spoken not only in Britain but also in the United States of America,Canada,Australia,New Zealand,South Africa and so on. Thus,English has so many forms of pronunciation and its pronunciation v...[继续阅读]

    There are 26 letters in the English alphabet,i.e. A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z. There are five vowel letters,i.e. A,E,I,O,U.And there are 21 consonant letters,i.e. B,C,D,F,G,H,J ,K,L,M,N,P,Q,R,S,T,V,W,X,Y,Z. But there are more than ...[继续阅读]

    If we want to represent speech sounds in writing we can transcribe the sounds using either:(a) phonemic symbols // (in slanted brackets);(b) phonetic symbols [ ] (in square brackets).Phonemic symbols represent the phonemes of English-for example /&650;/. ...[继续阅读]

    Throughout this book,we will use the symbols below from the phonetic alphabet torepresent English sounds. When you encounter these symbols,remember that they areintended to represent sounds. That is they are not letters,but symbols for sounds.Ⅰ. Symbols f...[继续阅读]

    All the sounds we make when we speak are the result of muscles contracting. The muscles in the chest that we use for breathing produce the flow of air that is needed for almost all speech sounds; muscles in the larynx produce many different modifications ...[继续阅读]

    Natural speech is a continuous stream of sounds which we “segment” into pieces and a phoneme is the smallest,linguistically meaningful segment of speech. So,the words man and pan can each be segmented into three sounds or phonemes and what distinguishes t...[继续阅读]

    The English spoken sounds,like the sounds of any other language,are generallydivided into two main classes: vowel phonemes and consonant phonemes.Vowels are sounds produced without obstruction of the air passage in the mouthbut with the vibration of the v...[继续阅读]

    IntroductionThere are four front vowels in English: /i:/, /&618;/, /e/ and /&230;/. In forming the frontvowels the front of the tongue is chiefly instrumental in giving the vowels their quality.The varying distance of the tongue from the hard palate in co...[继续阅读]

    IntroductionThere are three central vowels in English: /&652;/, /з:/, /&601;/. In forming the centralvowels,the middle of the tongue is raised toward the dividing line between the hardand soft palates. For /з:/ the tongue rises as high as for /e/, but is ...[继续阅读]