Accent for Listeners (AFL) focuses on helping learners to develop the flexibility to deal with accent variation: English is a global language, and naturally, there is a huge variety in the way it is spoken.
Within the PronPack collection is the Pronunciation for Listening series, dealing specifically with pronunciation as a receptive skill. The series includes; Connected Speech for Listeners, dealing mainly with grammar, and Word Recognition for Listeners, dealing mainly with lexis. Together, the three books provide background reading plus teaching ideas and materials for dealing in class with listening to spoken English.
The Minimal Pair Collection complements the Listening Series providing teachers with a bank of ideas and material focusing on English phonemes and phoneme contrasts. All four books are user-friendly, with short well-signposted chapters, providing maximum accessibility for the busy teacher.
COMING SOON! This book, the latest in the award-winning Pronpack Series, will be in available in print from Amazon (.com, .com.au, .ca, .de, .es, .fr, .it, .co.uk) – 17 May 2026 – with eBook versions on Kobo and Apple to follow.
This book consists of four sections. Sections A and B are background reading. Section C focuses more on specific pronunciation features which vary across accents, and D contains practical teaching materials and ideas for highlighting these features in class.
Section A contains 12 short chapters introducing key themes relating to the topic of accent in language learning. You can read this section straight through for a complete overview of the issues related to accent. On the other hand, the chapters are free-standing, meaning that you can dip into them at separate times if you prefer. The topics include what accents are, how they change, how they relate to pronunciation, and how they may feature in the teaching of English.
Section B looks at regional accents around the world and the key ways in which they differ from one another. The first chapter in the section explains what regional accent variation is, and the chapters which follow each provides a brief overview of accents of English in a specific area of the globe. The final chapter looks at second-language accents of English.
Section C outlines some of the most significant pronunciation features which differ across accents. This section of the book looks in more detail at those specific features of pronunciation which stand out as being variable across accents. Most of these features relate to consonant or vowel sounds, since these are both noticeable and relatively easy to describe without requiring too much theoretical background knowledge.
Section D provides practical material for accent awareness raising activities in language classrooms. There is material for 24 lessons, each raising awareness of a specific pronunciation feature which varies across accents. Each lesson is based around a short rhyming text containing multiple examples of the target feature, followed by explanatory notes. The actual lesson material for taking into the classroom, including audios and images, can be freely downloaded from the support website for this book.
Classroom materials: support materials for this book are available to download here. This material consists of a Powerpoint file with a slide for each of the 24 lessons in Section D. The slides include the short texts for the lesson accompanied with a colour illustration and audio files in which we hear the text read out in three or four different accents.
Read or download the PronPack: Accent for Listening sample pages, and check out the other books in the pocket book series below:
PronPack: Connected Speech for Listeners – background tips plus lesson ideas and materials for teaching English connected speech, with a focus on improving listening fluency.
PronPack: Word recognition for Listeners – background tips plus lesson ideas and materials to help learners develop their ability to recognise words in the spoken form, including a focus on word stress and affixation.
PronPack: The Minimal Pair Collection provides teachers with a complete bank of ideas and material for focusing on English phonemes and phoneme contrasts. Rather than prescribing a single target model, the book takes a distinctive, ‘accent-friendly’ approach which recognises and accepts the varieties of English around the world today.