It is an excellent book and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is looking for improving his English speaking skills. I had bought other books in this category that were more expensive (around $100) than this one but this one is the best. Ann's teaching is clear and superb. I will buy two copies as gifts for my brother in law and my niece in China.

I do agree with the other reviewers that it is an excellent book written by a professional with extensive experience. It comes with 6 CD and almost 200-page book with detailed explanations of intonation patterns and sounds. Additionally, in the appendix Ann Cook discusses in detail what are the typical accents of native speakers of common languages, and what specifically the native speakers of these languages should work on.

The chief difficulty with working with a course like this is that the learner should not only repeat after the speaker, but should also be able to hear his/her own words to make the necessary corrections. If you keep on repeating the same mistake, but do not hear it and cannot correct yourself - what's the point of practicing? My solution is to practice with a computer. I tried a simple sound recorder on a computer as well as a tape recorder, and it did not work - too complicated, invoves too much button pressing. You need a program which plays a phrase, then records you repeating it, then repeats the native speaker, then plays your recording, and does it all over again in a loop until you are satisfied. It turned out that it is not easy to find a program like this; after a long search, I found a shareware program called FollowMe, its trial version can be downloaded from tarsoft's site or shareware servers (perhaps there are other programs like this which I did not come across, I am talking about the learning concept here). For me personally working with a computer and using a program like described above made a tremendous difference, I really feel that I am getting the most from this book. I can hear my mistakes and I feel that I am correcting them.

While with a course like this the price is much less important than the result and productivity of learning, this book (in my opinion) satisfies both, good quality and reasonable price. Recommended.

Hi everybody.
I've got this book in amazon. It was delivered last week in perfect conditions, no scratches in CDs by the way, and I've begun with the practices this week.
I am from Mexico City, and in this city it's quite difficult to get a good english pronunciation. The most important and famous schools here focus in grammar, a little in listening and barely in pronunciation. Then you can here anybody who learned English speaks with several mistakes of pronunciation.
I don't wanna be one of those whose accent causes native people get bored or annoyed.
The practices seem to be great and the author catches the most important mistakes in every nationality she mentioned. I think she showed me in her book some mistakes that I hardly noticed.
It was a good purchase.
P.S. Sorry if I had grammar mistakes.

Though helpful for training rhythm, intonation, and to some extent sounds, a major shortcoming of the book and accompanying CD's is that all examples are given in one voice, the author's, who does not speak standard American English, as defined by the pronunciation indicated by all major dictionaries (Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, etc.).
The phoneme "aw" is conspicuously absent from the CDs and the book, for it is replaced by "ah" in the author's dialect, so that 'caulky' and 'cocky', e.g., are pronounced alike.
There is actually one sample of speech that is not spoken by the author; it is a radio extract, which is spoken in standard American English; and the book uses a special symbol to represent the phoneme "aw" that occurs in the extract, without any explanation whatsoever.

I had a look an many of the books on accent reduction and American Accent training. Many of the books had exercises similar to American Accent Training (AAT). But what they did not have was that not only were the exercises read aloud by the author but also the passages BETWEEN the exercises are read by her. This helped me greatly because I could repeat the exercises as well and the passages. So, I had twice as much material as any other book!

Ms. Cook is very helpful is giving suggestions and one can actually write/email her. And she is quick in replying back too. I liked this because I could ask more about the book and her suggestions on studying from the book. Its greatly helps to ask the author about his/her book.

She encouraged me to learn through telephone conversations but I thought that to be rather expensive.

The BOOK:

The book starts with basic pronunciations and goes into details like liasons between words. With 5 CDs there is alot to learn. Also, with CDs it is easy to rewind or repeat the tracks as often we wish. The book does a great job in teaching students many of the tricks and pronunciation rules one observes with the Americans.

My best suggestion in using this book would be to read, practice and listen to Americans. I learnt alot by observing how the Americans speak and very often you can relate a certain pronunciation to a rule in the book. And, that is fun!