Final Report for ISL Grant Project 2008
The project involved developing a package of interactive online audio-based exercises to help students to develop (i) their understanding of key concepts in the sub-discipline of phonetics and (ii) their practical skills in the processes of phonetic description and transcription. This requires students to develop a more ‘concrete’ sense of auditory qualities and how those qualities relate to specific articulatory and/or acoustic properties. An online interface was chosen because it allows individual learning in a way which is not possible within the limitations of lecture and tutorial programs. (This has become even more important now that the School of Humanities has been forced to cut the number of tutorials per semester.) The project was designed to work from the natural skills and biases that students bring to the area. The general skills of phonetic description are generally difficult to acquire due to native-speaker bias, that is the natural tendency to perceive speech sounds in other languages in terms of the sound categories of one’s first language. However speakers are typically very sensitive to dialect differences within their own first language and well able to discriminate different speech sounds. So the program was designed to start students initially on a broad range of dialects of English and then move on to a sample of other languages.
A key goal of the project design was to make the package engaging to students by
- recruiting students in the Phonetics & Phonology unit to provide samples each year
- recording a language history for each contributor to give a more personal flavour
- an attractive and functional online format
- a diversity of components and activities with opportunities to engage interactively, including the facility to allow students to test their skills as they proceed.
- sequences appropriate to the concepts at different unit levels.
In the first stage, six students in the Phonetics and Phonology unit volunteered to record English dialect samples, including four who speak English as a second language. In order to get a wide range of dialects we recruited three other Linguistics students, and seven staff (from across the university). Another student who is a speaker of Lele, a language of Manus Island (PNG) was also recruited to add to existing audio materials on other languages. For each person we recorded a language history, a casual speech activity, and an extensive set of pronunciations of individual words in isolation. The audio recordings were processed to produce individual samples and measurements were taken to allow for graphic presentation in the online materials.
The general framework for the online system was designed and the specifications for the set of activity types was developed. The original plan was to implement these within an online format to be developed by a research assistant. However given the level of technical skills available, we were not able to conclude this to a satisfactory level within the amount budgeted in the grant. The decision was made not to use the resulting interface initially but to deliver the audio samples through webCT and a very basic webpage design. This was eventually trialled in a limited way in the Phonetics & Phonology unit in 2010. We have since put further work into the interface and plan to complete a more advanced version by the time the unit is run again in 2011. This will be resourced from other funds. The evaluation of the trialled materials has been positive at this initial stage. Informal comments indicate that students found it fun to compare a range of English dialects and novel to explore exactly how these pronunciations differ. We have not yet been able to evaluate the effects on development of concepts and skills. Evaluation was also conducted in the SPOT survey in 2010, together with other online interactive exercises. The item, ‘The interactive materials … have been helpful.’ received a rating of 4.22 out of 5.
The original plan was to introduce parts of these materials into other Linguistics units. At this stage we are planning new units and a review of existing units for the new major to be offered from 2012 and, given that the interface is not yet up to a high standard, we have delayed the introduction of the phonetics materials until then.
Despite the technical difficulties, we consider as successful the design stage, the sample collection process, and to a lesser degree, the very basic interface developed so far. We are committed to developing the interface to a useable standard for the Phonetics and Phonology unit in 2011.
Budget acquittal
The full budget was used to employ a research assistant to record the audio samples and a research assistant with programming skills to develop the online interface. The balance between these varied slightly from that originally proposed, as extra time was required for processing the audio files.
Dr John Henderson
Linguistics