LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

Phonology and Phonetics Review

A review unit for students of phonology and phonetics

Mark my words: creative assessment and effective feedback in linguistics
Event date: 30 May, 2008
Location: CILT, London SE1

The future of Phonetics (25 Feb 2005)
Event date: 25 February, 2005
Location: CILT,

Mini-projects: Call for bids
The Subject Centre is funding small projects to address the development, implementation and evaluation of innovative approaches to teaching, learning and assessment in Higher Education. The scheme is aimed at academics wanting to develop and evaluate new approaches to their teaching practices.

'Uptalk' becoming standard speech
An article on the BBC news website, 21st June, 2005, discusses how 'uptalk', the pattern of speech used by young people where every sentence ends on a rising note, is fast entering the mainstream.

Linguistics for applied linguists and lecturers in English language
A brief description is provided of the content of a master’s programme which focuses on preparing participants to teach English Language and/or Applied Linguistics at university level. An overview of the content shows the role of linguistic theory in the programme. A slightly more detailed account is given of the content of the phonology component to illustrate how linguistic theory relates to practical issues in language learning.

Phonological change
This article provides an overview of the issues involved in teaching sound change at undergraduate and graduate level.

Phonetics in pronunciation teaching for modern foreign languages
Set against the history of the relationship between phonetics and pronunciation teaching, this paper outlines the needs of both the teacher and the learner in terms of phonetic knowledge in today's multilingual classrooms. It suggests sources of information for consultation by teachers and refers to established research demonstrating the value of phonetics in pronunciation teaching and learning. It concludes by recommending an ideal case scenario and offers a number of useful web addresses with brief annotations for the benefit of teachers and learners.

Phonology
Phonology is the study of contrastive sound units in language. It can be taught as 'principles of phonology' which looks at universal properties of sound systems or as 'the phonology of a language' which talks about standard and variant pronunciations in a particular system. Phonology is a crucial part of many areas of linguistics, such as first- and second-language acquisition, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics.