If you are a very keen learner or a would-be English teacher and you are interested in finding out more about grammar and pronunciation, you are in the right place!
English After RP: Standard British Pronunciation Today
In many ways, contemporary British English sounds different from traditional RP (the model usually adopted by dictionaries and pronunciation textbooks). If you are teaching or learning 21st-century standard British English pronunciation and want to understand the differences, then I would highly recommend Dr Geoff Lindsay's English After RP: Standard British Pronunciation Today. In this handy reference guide, he goes over vowel and consonant changes, as well as intonation and stress patterns. Note that you will need some understanding of phonetics to benefit most from this book. The author has a great blog.
Longman Pronunciation Dictionary
If you want to find out the different ways to pronounce a word, then you need more than a regular dictionary, which in most cases only gives you a typical pronunciation of a word—one in traditional RP and one in General American. The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary by John C. Wells is an excellent resource that allows you to look up pronunciation variants. For example, the word amateur can be pronounced in quite a few different ways in British English (/ˈæmətə/, /ˈæmətʃʊə/, /ˈæmətʃə/, /ˈæmətjʊə/, and /ˌæməˈtɜː/), but an ordinary dictionary will only show /ˈæmətə/ and/or /ˈæmətʃə/. The best thing about this dictionary is the accompanying CD-ROM (only suitable for PCs, not Macs), which, with some of the entries, shows you pie charts illustrating which pronunciation is more popular or an indication as to what older and younger speakers may prefer to say. The pronunciations of many male/female names (e.g., Siobhan /ʃəˈvɔːn/ or /ʃɪˈvɔːn/), brand names (e.g., Hermès /ˌeəˈmes/), and loanwords from other languages used in English (e.g., naiveté /naɪˈiːvəteɪ/) can also be found.
Practical English Usage
Michael Swan's Practical English Usage is one of the best grammar books I have found. Clear explanations and examples are given for all those tricky grammar points that often bother teachers and learners. If you need a handy reference guide, this is it.
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