Some thoughts on teaching and learning phonetic transcription

Abstract

Phonetics instructors often observe considerable variability in the ease with which students learn phonetic transcription. As an initial step toward understanding this variability, 50 students were tested on 12 phonological awareness (PA) tasks (e.g., finding the odd vowel, odd consonant, or odd stress pattern in a set of words, determining the word that would result from speech sound substitution, deletion, or reversal, …). Students were tested at the beginning of an introductory phonetics course. PA performance was then compared with student performance on: (1) quizzes and exam items related to transcription, and (2) student performance on all aspects of the course other than transcription. A strong relationship (ρ = 0.84) was found between average PA and transcription performance. However, a very strong relationship (ρ = 0.88) was also found between average PA and student performance in all areas of the course other than transcription. This finding suggests the possibility of underlying causal relationships that are considerably more complicated—and more general—than a simple dependency on PA skills. In more practical matters, the talk will also describe a collection of computer exercises that were developed to provide students with drill in phonetic transcription.