This is a comprehensive guide to English speech. It will help you score well in speaking tests, give more dynamic-sounding presentations, and speak more smoothly in everyday life.
Clear Speech is the best-selling English pronunciation textbook in the world. If you have asked, "How do I speak English more naturally?" then this is the course for you.
There are 15 in-depth units that cover every aspect of the basics:
- word stress;
- vowel rules;
- patterns in sentence stress;
- choosing the focus word;
- adding emphasis;
- consonants; and
- speaking in clear thought groups.
In addition to helping your spoken output, this course will help you with your listening skills. The more you understand how English pronunciation works, the more you will be able to understand spoken English.
Clear Speech focuses on each sound in the context of a word or thought group, so you don't need to sound like an American or a British person. You can continue to sound like yourself, but a clearer version of yourself.
Time to complete
First, please download the .zip file of Clear Speech listening files.
How to teach this book
We have to follow each of these three fundamentals to teach this book effectively:
- Some bits are easy. If your student can produce the language well, skip liberally.
- The first two chapters (pp. 1-17) are very basic and can be done very quickly.
- There is a lot of listening.
- Download the listening exercises and use them intelligently. There are two ways of dealing with listening sections.
- If there is an audio script in the book, then you can read it out.
- If no audio script is available, use the MP3s you have downloaded. You can also assign listening for homework if the exercises are long or relatively easy.
- Download the listening exercises and use them intelligently. There are two ways of dealing with listening sections.
- Each principle in this book needs to be applied to real-world situations.
- Eg: The bit about spelling: "How do you spell your name?/your favorite actor's name?/Shinzo Abe's name?"
- Take breaks: "Let's apply this, shall we? So, tell me, what's the best place for lunch in your city? Remember to use [skill that you are practising]."
Answer keys and most audio scripts are included in the Teacher's book, in line with the exercises.
Trial lesson of Clear Speech
Clear Speech is different from Pronunciation In Use because of its focus on stressed and unstressed vowels, as well as an approach it calls "The Music of English".
If a student is interested in this textbook, you can send them the trial lesson PDF, Sample lesson of Clear Speech 4 (Int) student's book: The schwa (unstressed vowels). There are a few points that would be good to hit in the first lesson together:
- PDF p. 1 (text p. 25/Unit 4A) is a good starting point. The schwa is one key to speaking smoothly but a lot of our students (particularly Japanese people) don't get it or have never heard of it.
- You can skip ahead here because time is short and it's a trial lesson.
- PDF p. 4 (text p. 28/Unit 4G)—the top of the page has a great visualisation of vowel stress. Notice that all the vowels can unstress to schwa.
- PDF p. 5 (text p. 29/Unit 4J)—this exercise would be a good place to end. It's a whole page on the difference in pronunciation between "can" and "can't". This should help greatly with listening and speaking.
If the above information doesn't hit, look at the last page of the PDF (p. 6/text p. 30/Unit 4L) and see the Music of English. That should be an interesting aspect of communication for our students.