Accurate English: A Complete Course in Pronunciation

It includes many rules that are necessary for the student to learn how to pronounce correctly. If the student has practiced following the book, his pronunciation will be improved.

This is a text book for my friend who is taking ESL class, and I found her English pronunciation really improved.

This is a great book. In my opinion it is the best pronunciation book, I used it as a 2nd level textbook (it is far more advanced than other books, though very clear and easy to deal with). My University pronunciation professor at Columbia suggested it as an additional tool for those who were interested in going deep into the subject. Good both for beginners and advanced students, you can customize your study experience avoiding the advanced parts or some exercises.
Cons: The only audio support available are audiotapes (who can still use them???), and they are expensive indeed.

To my knowledge, the best course on American pronunciation. The title says it all: it is accurate and complete. There are practices with minimal pairs, and it uses the IPA symbols. Sections on fast speech rules, vowel reduction and stress placement will bring advanced speakers to near perfection. Audio tapes are superfluous with a good knowledge of the phonetic alphabet.

We have used Accurate English as a textbook in our pronunication and intonation classes at our university because it is a great technical resource for students who are trying to improve their pronunciation and simultaneously want to learn something about how sounds are produced. The book's approach is to help non-native speakers learn about and experiment with the principles of articulatory phonetics (the way the sounds of language are produced by the mouth, tongue and vocal tract). It explains many of the terms used in linguistics and speech pathology in a way that anyone can understand, and encourages students to become more aware of the ways that they produce speech sounds. This approach can be very very helpful, even with students whose non-native speech habits have become deeply entrenched.

The book covers all the essential components of a course in pronunciation: consonants, vowels, rhythm, stress, and intonation. It has lots of exercises to help students learn the sounds of American English and they way they are produced. It also has some of the best information I have seen on learning how the sounds of English correspond with orthography (spelling). It is a perfect book for one-on-one tutoring in accent reduction or pronunciation. If you are using it as a classroom text, it tends to be a little dry, but it does contain a lot of exercises. They just aren't as context-based as some of the others out there. It wouldn't be hard to supplement the exercises in this book to keep students interested, however. It can also be a resource for teachers to use to supplement an advanced class with meatier material.

If you are a student, you will need to find a native speaker to help you with some of the exercises and provide feedback. If you buy the tapes, you'll be able to listen to the exercises, but you'll still need to get someone to listen to you and help adjust your pronunciation. This is true for all pronunciation books, by the way; it's not unique to this book.

Great book!