4.2 Books focused on SC pronunciation
Let us look at the titles written in English first. The number of textbooks and teaching materials concerned solely with SC pronunciation is quite small. Huang (1969) is limited to simple descriptions of the articulation of particular consonants, vowels, diphthongs, and triphthongs, accompanied by sketches of vocal organs, adding explanation of tones (note that Huang uses the IPA symbols in comparison with various romanization systems including Pinyin). Dow (1972) treats the topic more comprehensively (up to stress, but not intonation), although the main emphasis is on description of vowels and consonants (he does not work with Pinyin, using the IPA instead; the sketches of the position of articulatory …show more content…
Another example of a fairly detailed pronunciation textbook worth mentioning is Duiwai hanyu yuyin (Zeng, 2008; note the author employs the IPA). Very useful insights into particular sore points of learning SC pronunciation are offered in Zhu (1997) and Cao (2010).
Besides the textbooks, there exist several monographs published in P.R.C. which offer qualified description of SC sound structure within the Pinyin framework, e.g. Xiandai hanyu yuyin gaiyao (Wu et al., 1992), Putonghua yuyin changshi (Xu, 1999), Yuyinxue jiaocheng by Lin & Wang (2003, 2013).
Unfortunately, above-mentioned books are written in Chinese, thus they are not directly accessible to the learners of Chinese and broader readership. It may be regretted that no English translation of such textbook or monograph is available.

4.3 Research …show more content…
For instance, the above mentioned notion of distinctive features may help in understanding that the same phonetic feature (e.g. voicing) ¬may be utilized differently in SC and in student’s L1. For instance, voicing is not distinctive in SC, while it is distinctive in Czech; aspiration is distinctive in SC, while it is not distinctive in English. The notion of phonemes and allophones may help in understanding why the same Pinyin letter can represent several rather different sounds (e.g. the letter ‘i’ / the phoneme /i/ is read as [i] in lǐ 里, as [j] in xià 下, as [ɪ] in lái 来, as [ɿ], [ʅ] in zì 字, shì 是). The notion of complementary distribution may help in understanding why ü in the syllables such as ju, qu, xu does not require an umlaut in orthography, while in nü, lü does (the letter ‘u’ represents two different phonemes: /u/ and /ü/). See e.g. Lin Yen-Hwei (2007:138, 2014), Duanmu