Teaching Original Pronunciation

There comes a point when students who are reading older texts want to hear how those texts sounded and thus try to read them aloud themselves. At this point, historical phonology becomes not just a fascinating intellectual exercise but something practical and useful. It isn’t just students of English language who are interested but students of literature and theatre too. This chapter reports the author’s experience in teaching Shakespearean original pronunciation to voice specialists, dialect coaches, theatre companies, and students of English, in both first-language and second-language contexts. It reviews the kinds of question students ask and discusses teaching strategies.