Sukhova N. V. «A course in phonetics»: a purpose-designed corpus and its potential usage

This paper discusses the possible ways how to use a special corpus designed at the Department of Modern Languages and Communication in NUST ‘MISiS’
(Russia, Moscow). The corpus consists of original audio and video files in English. The material is balanced according to the following criteria: 1) the production time of 2015—2019; 2) topics; 3) intonation styles; 4) dialects; 5) gender. All files have metadata described and they are partially phonetically annotated. The corpus is collected to facilitate the phonetic disciplines teaching. These phonetic disciplines syllabi presuppose a great amount of students’ self-study work. The programmes, subject to the individual educational trajectory, open up to 91 academic hours for self-studying. Besides, there are more tradition methods of blended learning and asynchronous teaching where the corpus may be employed. The article exemplifies the corpus approaches during “A Course in Phonetics” and “Voice Coaching” lessons. The corpus utilization can comprise the following stages depending on the aims of the course and its learning outcomes: 1) the work on intonation styles (recognition, transcribing and intoning, imitation, discourse analysis); 2) the work
on intonation contours of communicative types of sentences (recognition, transcribing and intoning, imitation); 3) the work on segmental and suprasegmental levels (acoustic analysis, phonetic annotation).


Key words: corpus, phonetic disciplines, teaching phonetics, phonetic annotation, individual educational trajectories.

Reference to article:

Sukhova N. V. «A course in phonetics»: a purpose-designed corpus and its potential usage // Ivanovo State University Bulletin. Series «The Humanities». 2020. No.4. P. 59-64.

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