Acknowledgements

Writing this Open Educational Resource was a much greater challenge than I had anticipated, but also more rewarding than I had ever imagined.  It allowed me to delve more deeply into the fusion of my two life passions: sound and human speech.  

First and foremost, I want to thank my ever-patient partner Oliver for supporting me throughout this process.  Thank you for helping me answer some of the phonetic riddles I faced.  Thank you for assisting me in recording the vast amount of sounds that this work required.  Thank you for everything!

I am eternally grateful to my colleague and friend Dr. Carrie Tamburo for taking on the painstaking task of proofing my work and for offering her advice on so many aspects of this book.  I also want to thank my colleague and friend Dr. Eduardo Viana da Silva for encouraging me to take on this challenging project and for helping me come up with its title, I’m All Ears.  To my colleague and friend Dr. Ana Gómez Bravo, thank you for reviewing my work and for your feedback and recommendations.  To my former students Remington, Renata, and Andrew, thank you for recording the texts I needed to create active listening activities.

I would like to make a special mention of the UW Global Business Center and its support made possible by the U.S. Department of Education Centers for International Business Education program for their generous grant.  The grant allowed me to cover the cost of proofing, consulting, and the design of graphics, all of which, undoubtedly, made my work better.  As a way to thank them, I have included business-related vocabulary in most of the chapters in this book.

I also want to thank the University of Iowa and Dr. Jerald Moon for generously allowing me to use their animated diagrams of Spanish pronunciation.  The use of these diagrams has been extremely helpful to visually illustrate difficult issues regarding the articulation of sounds that would take many words to describe.

To all of you, thank you, thank you, thank you!