Brian Teaman | OJC / IC Phonetics

Preparations for the Phonetics class in the International Communications Major at OJC

Potential Major Sub-divisions:

Theory and methods for teaching foreign language oral skills.
Improvement in students own ability to recognize sounds of NAE and other Englishes.
Improvement in students' ability to produce sounds of of NAE and other Englishes.
Awareness of the phonetics of Japanese.
General phonetics, especially articulatory.
Exploring sounds of languages besides English and Japanese. (Why? 1. it will help students think about teaching English to speakers of other languages. 2. It will help them if and when they need to learn or improve their other languages. 3. It can be quite enjoyable and challenging.)
Technological applications: speech analysis, speech recognition, teaching applications.

Preparation for the Phonetics Class Spring 2012.

Class will meet 3 hours per week for 15 weeks (45 hours).

Major Components:

General Phonetics Knowledge (40%) Reading, Experiments, Speech Recognition. Students will:

be familiar with general concepts of general phonetics and phonology of English and Japanese.
be able to perform experiments which involves the following: design of the experiment, collection of data, analysis of data and writing a report.
design and perform automated production tests using an internet-based system* which includes writing grammars for speech recognition and interpreting the results.

Phonetics in Education (30%) Reading, Curriculum Plans, Lesson Plans Students will:

be familar with general concepts of the teaching and learning of the sound systems of second languages.
design the phonetics component for one year of study for the age of students of their choice.
create one detailed lesson plan for a 15 minute lesson and teach it to their classmates.

Practice in Identification and Production of the sounds of English and Japanese (30%) Listening, production, Students will:

be able to recognize, produce and transcribe broad features of standard Japanese and major local variants.
be able to recognize, produce and transcribe broad features of World Englishes.

This is a system that I currently am developing which iinvolves internet based recording and grading of speech. Grading is done by humans as well as using automatic speech recognition software.

Get printout of Mark Tanner's paper from TESOL 2007. Pause errors are important. FACETS analysis.

Residue:

Electronic issues like transcription software and fonts, useful websites, evaluating websites

Dialect survey: Look at my results and try it yourself.

Classes