The second edition of this best selling textbook introduces undergraduates to the concepts, terminology and representations needed for an understanding of how English is pronounced around the world. Assuming no prior knowledge, it guides the reader through the vocal tract and explains how the sounds of speech are made, offering an accessible and expanded introduction to areas including transcription, vowels and acoustic analysis. As far as possible, it uses naturally-occurring conversational speech so that readers are familiar with the details of everyday talk (and not just the careful pronunciations presented in dictionaries). The book also includes a new concluding chapter that works through a piece of spoken data to show the reader how a more complete phonetic analysis can be conducted.