Building an effective learning environment in a course in English phonetics

Paper presented at the Accents 2013 conferenceThis paper presents modern online teaching methods we applied in a blended learning course in English phonetics for 1BA English philology students. Our aim is to offer suggestions on how to create a flipped-classroom-style effective learning environment that boosts learners’ autonomy and engagement with the course. The suggestions range from reusing freely available solutions such as Google Apps to showing examples of custom-developed Moodle plug-ins and web apps. The traditional approach to education has long had the teacher is in the centre, acting as the distributor of knowledge and controller of student activity. But today, students can be offered a personalised process of learning, with the teacher’s role effectively reduced to a guide who only pushes learners in the right direction. Our goal was to prepare a diversified learning environment that would inspire creativity and critical thinking in students, as well as require interaction between the learner and the material. As a theoretical framework for designing the course, we followed Nicholls (2002), Carmean and Haefner (2002) and Fullan (2012). In our paper, we discuss the following aspects of an effective learning environment and present the following methods we used to attain the desired results: 1. Social learning and how it can be fostered with the help of Google Apps to personalise students’ learning materials (Blau and Caspi 2009: 53, Pacansky-Brock 2012: 48, 117). 2. Active learning using webquests and the Moodle glossary activity type where students are required to seek information on the web, and create and share their own definitions to teach their colleagues. 3. Contextual learning that expects students to apply their knowledge in believable scenarios, e.g. a short answer activity type with an on-screen clickable keyboard containing IPA symbols for both RP and GenAm English. We highlight the usefulness of pre-programmed feedback specific for most common wrong answers. 4. Student-owned and engaging learning: following the success of such massive open online courses as Khan Academy, we supplemented pre-class readings with screencasts to cater for different learning styles. We then introduced post-class free practice activities, our flagship practice activity being an in-house developed phonetic transcriptor of RP English, which allows students to practise allophonic transcription without teacher supervision

Spectral Dynamics in L1 and L2 Vowel Perception

This paper presents a study of L1 and L2 vowel perception by Polish learners of English. Employing the Silent Center paradigm (e.g. Strange et al. 1983), by which listeners are presented with different portions of a vowel, a force choice identification task was carried out. Due to differences in the vowel systems of the two languages, it was hypothesized that stimulus type should have minimal effects for L1 Polish vowel perception since Polish vowels are relatively stable in quality. In L2 English, depending on proficiency level, listeners were expected to adopt a more dynamic approach to vowel identification and show higher accuracy rates on the SC tokens. That is, listeners were expected to attend more to dynamic formant cues, or vowel inherent spectral change (VISC; see e.g. Morrison and Assmann 2013) in vowel perception. Results for identification accuracy for the most part were consistent with these hypotheses. Implications of VISC for the notion of cross-language phonetic similarity, crucial to models of L2 speech acquisition, are also discussed

Dynamic Targets in the Acquisition of L2 English Vowels

This paper presents acoustic data on the dynamic properties of the FLEECE and TRAP vowels in the speech of two groups of Polish users of English. Results reveal that the more proficient group users, made up of teachers and professors with professional-level proficiency in English, produce more dramatic patterns of formant movement, reminiscent of native productions, than first year students. It is argued that vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) is an inherent aspect of English phonology, originated in interactions between vowels and neighboring consonants, and later generalized to the vowel system as a whole. By contrast, Polish is a language with a minimal role of VISC. Consequently, successful acquisition of L2 English vowels involves not only the mastery of vowels in F1- F2 space, but also formant trajectories over time

Doing phonetic transcription on Moodle

Poster presented at the 3rd International Conference on English Pronunciation: Issues & PracticesMoodle is an open-source learning management system, one of the leading e-learning platforms in use today at all levels of education. It has been successfully used in the teaching of phonetics and pronunciation (e.g. Ashby et al. 2009; Wilson 2008). This paper will present various aspects of the use of phonetic transcription on Moodle on the example of a b-learning module supporting a course in English Phonetics and Phonology within a university programme in English Studies. First, we will present our approach to interactive transcription exercises based on two Moodle question types: multiple choice and short answer with input from a custom-developed keyboard with IPA symbols. Pre-programmed hints for both wrong and correct answers provide comprehensive just-in-time feedback, which creates a more personalised and effective learning environment. A survey on students’ attitudes to Moodle solutions shows, however, that students prefer paper exercises because they can be completed faster. Various ways of delivering phonetic transcription to participants for presentation purposes will be presented (image vs. PDF vs. Flash vs. Unicode text), and their relative strengths and weaknesses will be discussed. Methods of styling the Unicode text of phonetic transcription as part of Moodle web pages will be described. Finally, we will demonstrate how the preparation of quiz questions can be automated and performed in batch mode offline (bypassing the often cumbersome question-building interface of Moodle) using widely available word-processing software such as MS Word. (The poster contains links to templates and tutorials. Feel free to contact the authors in case of any questions.