Speaking Teaching Books

I am Đạo, I'm living in Vietnam. In seperate words, I can pronounce well. But in such whole sentence or paragraph, I find it difficult to speak fluently.

For examples, sometimes words connecting to words (the last sound of word will connect to the next one) must have a rule. Or which words in a sentence do the speaker must emphasize ? Therefore all these problems must be ralated to intonation.

Actually my expression is bad, I guess. But please understand me. And would you help me to find a book which will figure out my thoughts.

Best regard,

Hi,
yes, there are books that deal with stress, intonation, and pronunciation.

I've read "American Accent Training" by Ann Cook. There's really a lot of stuff in that book (and on the 5 CDs). I haven't tried any other books anyway, so I can only tell you about that one. It treats American English, not British English or any other variety. Generally speaking, it's a really good book and I would recommend it.
Some points (just my opinion):

• She (Ann Cook) makes you notice almost all the features of English that you've never noticed (stress, intonation, liaisons, word reductions, contractions, vowels, tapped t... )
  
• Five CDs for audio lessons (she reads most of what's in the book, so you can listen while reading). Plus, she speaks very clearly.
• She said you will learn standard American English, but in my opinion her accent is not standard, I guess it could be Californian (not sure though, I could be totally wrong). Plus, the book doesn't consider the difference in pronunciation between "cot" and "caught", so the variety taught has the cot-caught merger.
• There's some confusing stuff in the book, learners should be careful. She sometimes tells you to do something he doesn't always do, and sometimes phonetic transcriptions don't match what she says.
• Exercises are sometimes boring, but that's normal, isn't it? Some parts and some exercises are really silly and not useful at all, in my opinion.
• The book is not for basic learners, IMO (but I see you can already write good English, so don't worry). 
  

Conclusion: even if it's not perfect (nothing is perfect in the world), I learned almost everything I wanted to know and I was amazed how many features I'd never noticed. My result: "comprehension +80%", more or less (which means that after the course I could understand almost double what I understood before, in speech).

Here's some stuff from Ann Cook's book, on a unofficial website (it's not Cook the one who speaks here)
http://www.5minuteenglish.com/pronunciation.htm

This is the official website:
http://www.americanaccent.com/

Best wishes

Anonymous wrote:

But in such whole sentence or paragraph, I find it difficult to speak fluently. For examples, sometimes words connecting to words (the last sound of word will connect to the next one) must have a rule.

Hi,

You can hear how different sounds are linked (in British English) from the BBC website:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/multimedia/pron/progs/prog1.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/multimedia/pron/progs/prog2.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/multimedia/pron/progs/prog3.shtml