Speakers of different languages regularly connect with each other through oral communication using a lingua franca, either face-to-face or remotely through the Internet. Using a spoken lingua franca for conducting business, gaining an education, or engaging in social interaction has become commonplace, elevating the role of oral language to a position of unprecedented importance in the fabric of life. Accordingly, the teaching of spoken communication skills requires serious reconsideration by a profession that was once satisfied with the idea that students would pick up these skills on their own if they were provided with enough opportunity to hear the language. John M. Levis engages with this reconsideration by placing intelligibility at the center of the matter and by carefully considering what should be taught to help students make their speech intelligible. What, on the surface, may seem to be a straightforward issue is appropriately problematized by Levis, who identifies the issues that impinge on achieving a simple solution. For example, how can norms of intelligibility legitimately be identified in a world in which many different native varieties of a language thrive? How should researchers and educators take into account the fact that much of the oral communication in the world today takes place between nonnative speakers? How can language teachers plan to teach what their students need to develop intelligible speech without overwhelming them with all of the detail of the sound system of the language? Levis argues that the complexity of such issues necessitates an intelligibility-based approach to oral communication. This book outlines this argument based on a thorough treatment of the detail of pronunciation for the contexts in which speakers need to be intelligible. Intelligibility, Oral Communication, and the Teaching of Pronunciation addresses crucial questions for teachers of English today and is a most welcome addition to the Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series.