J.M. Levis, Intelligibility, Oral Communication, and the Teaching of Pronunciation, Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series, Vol. 27, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018

Abstract

Globalization has had many notable effects on communication in the past decades. Two of them are: firstly, that English has become a major lingua franca for conducting business, gaining education, and engaging in social interaction, and secondly, that in these communication situations, “many, if not most, interactions in English around the world take place without the involvement of a native speaker” (p. 3). Furthermore, compared to other levels of language such as syntax and morphology, pronunciation is, according to most empirical evidence, the make-it-orbreak-it factor when it comes to informationally and socially successful conversations among non-native (L2) speakers of English as well as between L2 speakers and native (L1) speakers. In other words, globalization of economics and the media have given a new meaning to the research and teaching of phonological and phonetic issues. It is against this background that the monograph of John M. Levis was written. With a focus on English, its chapters are built around questions like: • How should the fact that most oral communication in the world today takes place between L2 speakers shape the research and training of phonological and phonetic issues? • How can we determine the relative importance of segmental and prosodic features for speech intelligibility and, thus, better decide which features should be given priority in L2 teaching? • To what extent should these decisions take into account contextual, situational, stylistic, and linguistic variables? The above questions already imply that Levis’ book is firmly anchored within the field of applied speech sciences. Yet, it is not a regular course book. It is a scientific monograph that provides an interdisciplinary state-of-the art overview of languageintrinsic and -extrinsic intelligibility effects, based on which the author develops a plea for reconsidering traditional empirical and theoretical approaches to secondlanguage teaching. Accordingly, the practical value of the book is limited insofar as it contains no specific instructions or exercises on how segmental and prosodic features Received: January 7, 2019 Accepted: February 20, 2019 Published online: May 16, 2019