As an English teacher, I have always struggled to find a book which thoroughly describes phonetics alone not phonology. Often I would choose some chapters from books such as Ladafoged and Johnstone’s “A Course in Phonetics 7th Ed.” In fact, I liked the exercises from that book, but the text gets a bit phonological in nature which makes students question many things since the course offered at our university is primarily leading learners to pronounce the language, so knowing how to produce sounds – consonants and vowels – is very crucial for them. Recently, I found another textbook which is based on American English pronunciation entitled “Pronouncing American English: Sounds, Stress and Intonation 3rd Edition” by Gertrude F. Orion. This book is also more of a pronunciation nature as the title entails; however, it provides enough information about articulatory phonetics based on American English. Nevertheless, Ogden’s book really provides a accumulative ground for phonetics of English based on articulation, transcription, and visualization through acoustic representations. In addition, this book is among the first ones that does not focus on a particular variation and provides description of English phonetics allowing the readers to come up with their own dialectal variations as they acquire skills of doing so through this book.

“I realized that describing the phonetics of ‘English’ is problematic because English is so phonetically heterogeneous” (Ogden, 2017, p. xi). Richard Ogden referring to the process and intention of drafting an auspiciously comprehensive book asserts that there are various varieties of English pronunciation and banking on one may interrupt the learning/teaching of phonetics to a diverse population of English speaking world. Although by saying so he primarily means the native varieties of English, he had done an extraordinary job of maintaining the descriptive notion of all native variations. In other words, he undertakes a more “descriptive phonetic framework” (Ogden, 2017, p. xi) rather than following a certain ‘model’. This perspective is quite in-line with the concept of “pragmatism” Kachru (1986, p.30) proposed while challenging the very prescriptivist or so purist perspectives (p. 30). By means of that, as he states, students (although Ogden refers to his audience as “readers”) can look into their specific variety. Thus, this book introduces the general phonetics of English avoiding majorly sticking to one variation and somehow banking on the data from International Phonetic Alphabets (IPA) for transcription; articulatory and acoustic phonetics to illustrate and visualize the sound production, pattern and representations.

The book has 12 chapters most of which is not much different from its first edition in 2009. The book has one extra chapter placed as chapter 11 titled “Sounds and Structures.” The books “To Readers” section does not mention about this chapter and its use for the students. Furthermore, in the introductory chapter of the book, the author does not talk or even does not point out anything specifically about the new chapter. More in-depth details of this chapter is provided below. In addition to that the book provides a table of content, and table of figure which guides the readers to necessary sections of the book. Furthermore, the book has a glossary for the main terminology and provides reader-friendly definitions. The exercises are very carefully designed which gives a very hands on experience to the reader/learner/students. Later, Ogden provides “Discussion of the exercises” in which answers to the exercises where applicable are discussed. In addition, Ogden have provided a list of further reading suggestions. However, this list is not that different from the book’s first edition except for ten added references and a couple references were deleted and plus one of the reference was mention 2003 in first edition while in the second edition, it is mentioned 2002. Finally, a very reader friendly “Index” ends the book.