Teaching phonetics in a flipped classroom

Abstract

Within the typical undergraduate linguistics curriculum, phonetics can maintain a special status. Instead of a lecture with discussion sections, students are often faced with labs and assignments that look suspiciously like those in their science classes instead of their humanities and humanistic social science courses. As such, some students struggle in these classes when they are taught in traditional lecture-lab formats. Here, I present the format I have recently used for teaching phonetics—“flipping” the classroom. Rather than completing assignments outside of class as in a traditional lecture-style class, participants watch lecture modules outside of class and class time is devoted to demonstrations, tutorials, and working through labs and related content. This format has resulted in increased student satisfaction and increased performance on an array of assessments. I will specifically discuss how I design the lecture modules, how we incorporate the in-class activities, and how this can be modified for a remote classroom if COVID-19 restrictions persist.