MARY LOU MARSOUN CANCIO & SADANAND SINGH , Functional phonetics workbook , 2nd edn. San Diego, CA: Plural Publishing, 2014. Pp. x + 325. ISBN 978-1-59756-990-3

Functional Phonetics Workbook is a graded and practical activity book on the basics of phonemic transcription of American English. Initially aimed at undergraduate students of communication disorders who are exposed to only one term of instruction in Phonetics, the material is also offered for self-study for individuals learning English, or for professionals in need of refreshing their IPA transcription skills. This workbook was originally designed by Sadanand Singh – who sadly passed away recently – and Mary Lou Marsoun Cancio, and its second edition has been published as a spiral-bound paperback, supplemented with a set of cardboard study flashcards for phoneme review, and three audio CDs. The instructional materials have been divided into sixteen chapters and four appendices, and this new edition sees the introduction of new units on central vowels and word stress, a glossary, as well as the addition of study questions at the end of each chapter. It is established from the beginning of this workbook that the preferred variety for instruction is Standard American English (SAE), defined as an ‘accent-free’ variety (p. 275), which may not echo other current views on what constitutes ‘accented speech’. The approach to transcription is mostly practical, and a great part of the material is characterised by an orderly and recurrent succession of hands-on activities, beginning with initial transcription exercises with audio support, which also introduce the distribution of the sounds in the syllable; this is followed by a second set of transcription tasks, which reveal the complexity of English spelling. A ‘Phoneme Description Page’ generally ensues, aimed at systematising the phonemes through a fact-file template that describes: distinctive features, tongue position, voicing/velopharyngeal port; spelling variations; word position; and clinical information related to each sound. At the end of every chapter, students are once again invited to integrate knowledge through witty thematic word searches and crossword puzzles that centre around several everyday vocabulary areas, as well as study questions to review key concepts. Even though the list of spellings and examples provided in the description pages is generally quite thorough, the use of slanted lines (//) to represent orthography in some units may lead students to confuse phonemes with graphemes; for example, the sound /p/ is said to ‘appear as /p/ in words’ (p. 42). At the same time, the joint presentation of silent letters/historical elision and sounds may appear to be puzzling to the student, such as for instance in the activity whose title is /g/, where the words gnat, laugh and gentle (p. 61) are introduced together with other /g/ words. Along the same lines, the presentation of spellings may also require a distinction between what is perhaps ‘standard’, and what can be seen as a process of assimilation, such as the production of /dʒ/ for ‘d’ in the word cordial (p. 139), claimed to be a common spelling. On a positive note, the repetition of the same task format in every chapter should clearly have a positive role in facilitating the learners’ acquisition of transcription conventions by creating a familiar order of tasks that limits the presence of distractors. The sequencing of stages for the introduction of the IPA starts from the presentation of familiar symbols resembling Roman letters, beginning with consonants, followed by the transcription of vowels, which in general happen to be more difficult for the learner to acquire.