About the Book:

Dialects and Accents for Actors, Storytellers and more.... A great training tool for classroom or for personal use!

Whether on stage or screen, much of the potential work available requires an American accent. And as such, the ability to do an American accent as an actor is an invaluable tool to have at your disposal. Dialects can instantly transform you into another person by affecting the very essence of who you are in the world – your speech. Dialects, for many actors, are enjoyable, useful tools.

The world's best selling American accent and pronunciation book has gained wide respect as a self-teaching program, but more and more speech trainers, teachers, and speech therapists report that they are also using it as a valuable teaching tool in their speech classes. This book starts at the most basic level – the syllable – and builds up to the complex intonation that is used in everyday English. This book will guide you to fluency in spoken American English. All aspects of the American accent are covered in detail – intonation, liaisons and pronunciation.

The revised and expanded 4th edition of Ann Cook's highly acclaimed American Accent Training, which now comes with downloadable audio, is packed with new methods to easily pick up the standard American accent. The structure of this best-selling book has been reorganized, offering students a much more clear and direct sequence of lessons and a path to better understanding. The downloadable audio component features talented and professional male and female voices, carefully selected to represent that perfect American pronunciation and intonation. With over 35 years of extensive research, the unique American Accent Training methodology has been refined to teach the American sound quickly and easily:

• Voice quality (the deep, rich tone of the American sound)
• Pronunciation (all the vowels, consonants, blends and diphthongs)
• Intonation (syllable stress rules and word stress in a sentence)
• Linking (liaisons phonetically transcribed so students can see the sound)

Using comprehensive intonation and pronunciation exercises and tests, students swiftly learn the real American accent. At the same time, listening comprehension improves dramatically, both for literal understanding and empathetic awareness. Supplementary materials include detailed nationality guides for ten languages and accent variations (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Korean, Arabic, and the US Southern accent).

This book has been leading the way with students and business people since 1991. Going where no accent book has gone before, American Accent Training continues to set the standard for all to follow, for anyone learning or teaching the American accent.

About the Author:

Ann Cook is the author of the best-selling American Accent Training text. She studied Spanish Literature at the California State University at Los Angeles, spent a year at the Institut d'Études Françaises in Aix-en-Provence, and five years in Japan at the Japanese Culture and Language Institute in Tokyo.