Pedagogical Phonetics

Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins

Mary Paster

In this course, we will introduce the essentials for doing phonetics of any language. We will start with a description of articulatory phonetics, with reference to the identification and classification of consonants and vowels. This will lead to a survey of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) whose symbols are a tool to assist the field phonetician in accurate and near-universal representation of sounds of a language. We will go over how to incorporate IPA symbols into text, and we will introduce Praat, a free program for phonetic analysis that can be run on any platform. At the end of the class, students who felt that they did not have a sense of what the sounds of language were like and how to deal with them should have a grasp of the basics and the means to learn more on their own.