First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Part 1 The need to teach the comprehension of spoken English: slow colloquial English and normal speech; testing or teaching comprehension?; the nature of comprehension; the processes of comprehension; the accent of English described in this book. Part 2 Ideal segments, syllables and words: the phoneme; the consonants of English; place of articulation; voicing and voicelessness; the vowels of English; the transcription of vowels; the ideal syllable and the ideal word. Part 3 The function of rhythm: the rhythmic structure of English; stressed and unstressed syllables; pause - rests in rhythm; the function of stress; word stress; stressed words in sentences. Part 4 Patterns of simplification in informal speech: adjustment to surroundings; elision; word boundary markers; consonants and vowels in the stream of speech; reduction in visual cues. Part 5 The function of intonation: the ideal organisation of tone groups; the ideal placing of the tonic; tone group and tonic in spontaneous speech; pitch direction. Part 6 Paralinguistic features: pitch span; placing in the voice range; direction of pitch; tempo; loudness; voice setting; articulatory setting; articulatory precision; timing of segments and syllables; lip setting; pause; constructing a framework; using the paralinguistic features. Part 7 Teaching, listening, comprehension: identifying the problem; recognising the code; processing the complete text; purposeful listening; the social context of listening; combining the approaches; bottom up processing - the phonological code; topdown processing - using the context to make predictions; making inferences; methodology; using the phonological cues; learning to use contextual information; drawing constrained inferences.