Phonetics with Listening Practice (British), SoSe 2025

In this course we are concerned with certain aspects of what the British linguist J. R. Firth called the noises we make with our faces in order to live.

You will learn how the sounds of English differ from the sounds of German, both in terms of the way they are produced and in terms of the way they relate to other sounds in the system(s) of the English language. You will practise producing individual English sounds and will also practise what the 18th century phonetician Joshua Steele called the melody and measure of English speech, i.e. its intonation and rhythm. Rhythm will provide a context in which to practise some other very important aspects of English, such as weak forms (the reduced, simplified way in which short function words like should or some or than are typically pronounced in normal speech), linking (running your words together smoothly into larger units, so that an apron sounds almost the same as “a napron”), and clipping (of which there are two types: 1) pre-fortis clipping, or shortening the length of the middle of a syllable if the end of the syllable is to be pronounced with more force, as in search, where the vowel is somewhat shorter than the vowel in surge, and 2) rhythmic clipping, or shortening the length of a stressed syllable if it is followed by unstressed ones, as in search – searching – searchable). In addition, you will have opportunities to review what you already know about the complicated relationship between sound and spelling in English.

The course includes a series of listening exercises, which are designed to provide a sample of all the major varieties of English. We will learn, among other things, why so many people misheard Neil Armstrong’s famous first words from the surface of the moon, why Australians and New Zealanders misunderstand each other’s short vowels (e.g. pan–pen–pin–pun), and what the underlying rhythm of Indian English is that presents speakers of other Englishes with so many hurdles when they try to understand what is being said. We will also listen to a recording of what English is predicted to sound like in 100 years’ time.

In the very first week, students have a choice: they can work at their own pace in asynchronous online mode, or work in synchronous online mode (via the MS Teams meeting on Tuesday 08 April). From week 2 (Tuesday 15 April) onwards, students can choose between following the course in synchronous online mode (via MS Teams meetings) or attending in person (building A2_2, room 1.22). There will be other tasks for you to work on between the weekly (virtual or face-to-face) meetings.

At the end of the course, there will be a brief (20 minutes) online oral exam, which will involve reading a text aloud, speaking spontaneously, and demonstrating at least a passive knowledge of the phonetic symbols used for transcribing English sounds.

There are two groups.
Group 1 meets Tuesdays from 10:15 to 11:45
Group 2 meets Tuesdays from 14:15 to 15:45

Students can attend whichever meeting they want, but please let me know in advance if you are switching groups just for one week.

The course will be structured in a number of blocks:

The first block will involve exchanging contact details and making decisions about communication channels and frequency of virtual or real contact, as well as providing a general overview of free online resources available for doing phonetics. You will give me information about your previous experience and the goals you wish to achieve in this course.

The second block will involve you sending me a voice message in which you read aloud two paragraphs of English prose. You can then tell me what aspects of your pronunciation you think you need to work on, and I can tell you whether I agree with you or whether there are other things I think you should work on. I will then point you to the resources you will need to practice with.

The third block will involve becoming more familiar with the basic concepts and terminology of Systemic Functional Linguistics and of phonetics and phonology; there will be reading material as well as slide shows. The central unit of the sound system of English is the syllable, so we will take the syllable as the point of departure for our explorations. We will look at the internal structure of the syllable, and at the larger units in which the syllable functions. We will also look at the more abstract phenomena that the sound system of English helps to “realise”, and at the more concrete phenomena that the sound system helps to organise and structure.

The fourth block will consist of practice in describing and producing the individual consonant and vowel sounds of English as they occur in syllables. We will begin with the material world: the anatomical organs of articulation, and the physiology and physics of sound. We will then study the differences between the sound systems of English and German. These differing systems are projected onto the material world of anatomy and physiology and physics to create the actual phonetic differences that you will need to master: you will learn to hear, and become able to produce, the difference between the English word happy and the German word happy (which is approximately the same as the difference between the English word jam and the English word gem) and you will learn to speak with one voice in English.

The fifth block will involve becoming more aware of what happens when syllables are strung together to form larger rhythmic units. Syllables rub against each other at their edges; sometimes sounds adapt to the new environment, sometimes they are simplified or lost. Some syllables stand out more than others. We will study the functions of these differences and practise their physical manifestations.

The sixth block will consist of practice in English intonation, based on material by M.A.K. Halliday. Intonation is understood in the broader sense, where it includes all the consequences of deciding how to chunk information into digestible bits and how to assign degress of importance, as well as the interpersonal and logical functions of rising or falling pitch.

The seventh block will involve assessment. Students will demonstrate that they can read IPA transcriptions, and will read aloud the same passage as at the beginning of the course, as well as discussing a topic of their own choosing.

For links to the course materials, see below:

BLOCK 1 — DEFINING GOALS

Week 01: Tuesday 08 April 2025 — Unit 01

First of all, some slides from the Contact Point for Studying with Disability, which is part of the university’s Equal Opportunities and Diversity Management Unit. If you are living with disability or chronic illness, the university can provide various forms of support.

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/KSB/KSB_Slides_for_lecturers.pdf

Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any kind of special needs.

Second, I will from time to time use the phrase CONTENT WARNING to alert you to the fact that some of the material may be offensive or triggering to some students, because it contains sexual innuendo, or references to drugs, or violence, or something else that could prove to be unsettling.

Third, you should all have received, as an email attachment, a one-page document containing all my contact details. If you haven’t received those contact details, please check the spam folder of your uni mail account and/or contact me directly.

You should also have received a four-page document entitled Initial Survey, containing a number of questions. These are not didactic questions, i.e. I’m not asking you questions to see whether you know something that I already know, I’m asking you questions because I want to find out something that I don’t yet know. If you haven’t already sent me your answers to these questions, could you please do so as soon as possible – preferably before the first class.

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit01_20251/B__Survey/

The most important questions are the ones concerning previous experience with IPA symbols, whether you have already taken a lecture course in phonetics, and how easily you can work online. Just ignore any questions that you feel are too personal. All information will be treated in the strictest confidence and will be destroyed as soon as it is no longer needed (viz., once your results have been received by the examinations office).

    

Here is the plan for the course, showing what we will be doing each week:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit01_20251/C__Plan

A more detailed version of the plan will be published shortly. It will detail the work to be done before and after each session, as well as showing which activities we will be engaged in during each (virtual or face-to-face) meeting.

Here is the official chart of phonetic symbols published by the International Phonetic Association, together with an extended version that contains additional symbols that are in widespread use:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit01_20251/D__IPA_Chart

You don’t need to know all of those symbols, but it’s probably a good idea to have constant access to a full IPA chart.

Here is the text I would like you to read aloud, so that I can work out which pronunciation problems you need to work on in this course:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit01_20251/E__Initial_Assessment

I would need to have the recording of you reading this text aloud by the weekend before the second class. You can send it as an audio file attached to an email, or as a voice message via any platform you like. Many students choose WhatsApp, but I’m on all social media platforms; so take your pick. The earlier you can send me your recording, the better!

Here you can find the slides for the first week’s session, plus a printer-friendly version containing their content in a more compact format:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit01_20251/F__Slides_and_Printout

If you like working on paper, you could print out the printer-friendly version of the slides and use it to take notes on while looking at the slides and/or watching the screen recordings of me working through the slides.

Here there are some screen recordings of me introducing the course and going through the slides:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit01_20251/G__Screen_Recordings

Note: There will probably only be recordings of the second half of the first week’s presentation – and those parts will have been recycled from previous semesters; the information contained in the slides should not have substantially changed since then, however.

In this directory you will find subdirectories containing photos of some of the people (linguists, phonologists, phoneticians ... ) whom you will become acquainted with during this course:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit01_20251/H__People

For one of the people — in all likelihood the most brilliant of them all – there is no photo available on the Internet. The main reason for that is probably that she was a woman. This notwithstanding, her students universally thought that she was awesome. If you are very keen, I can provide you with a link to a paper about a paper she delivered to her colleagues at a staff meeting once. (The rest is silence. — Sh. |Ham. V.ii.395)

The following directory contains three handouts that summarise some essential concepts:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit01_20251/J__Handouts

BLOCK 2 — REFINING GOALS

Week 02: Tuesday 15 April 2025 — Unit 02

All of the materials for this week can be found here:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit02_20251/

Here is an overview of the materials you can find there:

You will by now have sent me a recording of yourself reading aloud the text “Dialectal Differences”, and have received some feedback in both verbal and written form. In this directory, you can find the blank form on which I write the summary of my feedback, plus scans of the feedback for a student from a previous semester:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit02_20251/A__Feedback_Forms/

Here you can find scans of the pronunciation guide to the 5th edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD). This was before He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named introduced a non-standard IPA transcription system for describing younger-generation middle-class South-Eastern British English speech, just as all other dictionaries had managed to reach agreement about a more inclusive, ‘standard’ transcription system. The pronunciation guide from the 5th edition will give you a good overview of how the relationship between sound and spelling is perceived by native speakers of British English.

You’ll also find there the material by Professor Albrecht Neubert that I referred to, which provides an excellent overview of the problems faced by a typical German English-learner.

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit02_20251/B__Sound_and_Spelling

In the following directory you’ll find scans of four pages by M.A.K. Halliday on stress patterns in English compounds (such as boarding house) and pseudo-compounds (such as World War). (Spoiler: BOARDING house; World WAR.)

You’ll also find the slides for week 2, plus a printer-friendly version of them:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit02_20251/C__Slides_and_Printout

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Finally, a document which you might like to download. It contains direct links to the exercises that you can do in your own time to work on your specific pronunciation problems. Some of the exercises we will also work on in class:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit02_20251/D__INDEX_OF_EXERCISES/pronunciation_exercises_index.pdf

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BLOCK 3 — BASIC CONCEPTS

Week 03: Tuesday 22 April 2025 — Unit 03

To prepare for this week’s class, you could look at the following exercise about the syllable:

http://www.spence.saar.de/courses/phoneticswithlistening/unit03_20251/syllable_and_sonority.pdf

We can devote a few minutes to discussing the exercise at the beginning of the session. For this task, we could even experiment with reintroducing the whiteboard, and with making sure that online participants can see it clearly. A whiteboard is very useful in phonetics classes! Drawing a diagram on a whiteboard takes perhaps 30 seconds. Coding a diagram with TikZ in LaTeX sometimes takes 30 hours – and you have to know at least a couple of days in advance which diagram you’ll happen to need! :-(

A key to the exercise is available, but it is not on the website yet :-) ... it can be provided on request.

Most of this week’s session will be taken up with a slide presentation. I will race through those sections we have already touched on before, such as the concepts of STRATUM and RANK. The slides are here:

http://www.spence.saar.de/courses/phoneticswithlistening/unit03_20251/phonetics20250422-beamer.pdf

and if you like having something with a nice wide margin to take notes on (whether in an up-market PDF viewer, or on paper), you can get the contents of the slides in a more compact form here:

http://www.spence.saar.de/courses/phoneticswithlistening/unit03_20251/phonetics20250422-druck.pdf

If you are also taking my Written Expression (Intermediate) course, then I must apologise for the fact that some of the material in week 3 of Phonetics with Listening Practice is identical to some of the material in week 2 of Written Expression (Intermediate).

What if you can’t attend the class, either in person or online? In that case, here’s a link to some screen recordings of me going through an earlier version of the slides — the contents have not changed much since then, but I used to start with “Unit 00” and “Unit 00a”, so you will be seeing “Unit 01”, but it is equivalent to “Unit 03” in the new, more logical numbering system:

http://www.spence.saar.de/courses/phoneticswithlistening/unit01_20232/B__Screen_Recordings_RECYCLED/

Optionally, you can read a brief text (actually a letter) by a very interesting and original thinker, Benjamin Lee Whorf. It’s about semantic space, about how ideas are related like parts of a landscape – it might be relevant in connection with the diagram by Ferdinand de Saussure that I will be bombarding you with non-stop throughout the course:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit03_20251/WHORF/

That text constitutes the first chapter of Language, Thought, and Reality, Whorf’s collected works. There appears to be a misprint on the last page — I think left is supposed to be lift.

Finally: don’t forget the homework for week 4, which is mentioned at the end of the current slides – it is not the same as the homework mentioned at the end of the older, recycled slides:

I want you to learn the adjectives that are used to describe consonant sounds produced at the various Places of Articulation that are shown (and numbered) in the following diagram:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Places_of_articulation.svg

The diagram lists the names in German, English and Spanish — just scroll down the page to find them. If there are any issues with the pronunciation of the terms,

1. try googling them

2. raise the issue at the beginning of the class in week 4

One of the two most intelligent human beings I have ever met was born in 1898, fought in the trenches in the First World War in 1917 (for him at the time it was simply the “Great War”), and then went on to teach me English in 1970, when I was 13 going on 14 and he was 71 going on 72. He died in 1988, just before the online era began. I often imagine trying to explain to him the meaning of words such as the verb “to google”. :-(

Sh., Tempest, V, i, 215–218, c’est Miranda qui parle:

   O, wonder!
   How many goodly creatures are there here!
   How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
   That has such people in’t.

</sarcasm>

BLOCK 4 — BELOW THE SYLLABLE

Week 04: Tuesday 29 April 2025 — Unit 04

This week we look at the anatomy and physiology of producing contoids – sounds that could function at the margins of a syllable.

The slides and a printer-friendly version of them can be found here:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit04_20251/A__Slides_and_Printout

Here are the individual a4 pages of what would (in a pre-pandemic semester) have been the handout:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit04_20251/B__Handout

At the start of the session, I will check that you have done the homework. ]:->

In the middle of the lesson, you will receive a slip of paper, or, if you are online, I will text you the content of the slip of paper via the chat function of MS Teams. You will be given a description of a consonant sound that I want you to produce. The description will be in terms of voicing, place of articulation, and manner of articulation. You will read out the description aloud and then attempt to produce the sound, while we look at the IPA consonant chart. ]:->

Week 05: Tuesday 06 May 2025 — Unit 05

This week we look at the acoustic and articulatory phonetics of producing vocoids – sounds that could function at the nucleus of a syllable.

All of the materials for this topic can be found here:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit05_20251/

Note: There is a link on the slides to a vowel generator. The site seems to no longer be working, however. I’ve tried to find an alternative, so far without success. If necessary, I can play the role of the vowel generator in class.

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HIATUS — LINKS TO VARIOUS MATERIALS:

Here are the two extra documents that I referred to in class over the previous few weeks:

1) a document explaining pre-fortis clipping and rhythmic clipping:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/TIMING_two_problems/timing_two_problems.pdf

2) a document explaining how to make certain difficult consonant sounds:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/DIFFICULT_SOUNDS_how_to/difficult_sounds.pdf

3) Here are two lists, not yet in their final state:

The first is a list of all the vowels and diphthongs of English, with advice from Eckert and Barry on differences between English and German and what to pay particular attention to:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit06_20241/B__Handout/differences.pdf

The second is a list of all the consonant phonemes of English, with all the major allophones of each one. The list is based on Sauer, with additional information taken from the Internet. When the list is finished, it will contain, on even-numbered pages facing the current pages, further information about typical spellings and other things to pay attention to. The list also shows which section in Sauer contains the relevant exercises, in case we don’t manage to do all the exercises in class:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit07_20241/A__EXPERIMENTAL/ENGLISH_CONSONANTS.pdf

4) Here are some screenshots containing information that I regret having left out of previous units:

1) Systemic functional linguistics reverses the pattern of non-functional linguistics, by i) treating lexis purely formally (measuring, for example, the tendency of items such as sleep and furiously to collocate, with no concern for the meanings involved) and ii) treating syntax semantically, rather than formally:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/SCREENSHOTS/01__Peculiarities_1__formal_lexis__semanticky_grammar__we_unit02_214

2) When systemic functional linguists say “Semantics” they mean more-or-less what non-functional linguists call “Pragmatics”:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/SCREENSHOTS/02__Peculiarities_2__grammar_as__context-neutral_meaning__we_unit02_215.png

3) Systemic functional linguistics invests a lot of time and energy in providing detailed descriptions of paradigmatic relations. Originally the starting point for a paradigmatic description was a particular place in the structure of a unit; later, the unit as a whole was taken as the starting point, which meant that the description could become more abstract:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/SCREENSHOTS/03__Systems.png

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/SCREENSHOTS/04__SystemNetworks_Notation1.png

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/SCREENSHOTS/05__Graphic_conventions_in_system_networks__IFG4__p_x.jpg

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/SCREENSHOTS/06__Notational_Conventions__IFG4__p_ix.png

4) Firthian prosodic phonology. Linguistics in the UK developed independently of linguistics in other parts of the world (Professor Erich Steiner made Firthian linguistics known to the German-speaking world as “Der britische Kontextualismus”). The phonological part of Firthian linguistics has become known as ‘prosodic phonology’. Instead of phonemes, it uses a combination of ‘phonematic units’ (more general than phonemes) and ‘prosodies’ (suprasegmental ripples of palatalisation, velarisation, etc., which act on the syllable as a whole or on parts of it to produce the actual sound flow). Firthian prosodic phonology was decades ahead of its time.

i) Here is an example of a classic Firthian prosodic analysis – Eugénie J. A. Henderson’s description of the sound system of Vietnamese:

http://www.spence.saar.de/vietnamese/pdf/Bazell_et_al_1966_Henderson.pdf

ii) Here is Michael Halliday’s system network that specifies all the options available when producing a syllable in Mandarin, first the short version, then the full version:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/SCREENSHOTS/07__makh_mandarin_syllable_short__cmmim_arch_of_phon_321.jpg

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/SCREENSHOTS/08__makh_mandarin_syllable_full__cmmim_arch_of_phon_323.pdf

and here is a listing of the outputs of Halliday’s system network:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/SCREENSHOTS/09__makh_mandarin_syllable_total_output.pdf

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THE REST OF BLOCK 4

    

Week 06: Tuesday 13 May 2025 — Unit 06

In this unit, we will practise the vowels and diphthongs of the Received Pronunciation of British English. In two weeks’ time, we will return to the topic of vowels and diphthongs to work on them in even more detail.

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit06_20251/

    

Week 07: Tuesday 20 May 2025 — Unit 07

In this unit, we will do more work on English consonants. We will concentrate on the (for German-speakers) classically difficult consonants ð r w v.

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit07_20251/

    

Week 08: Tuesday 27 May 2025 — Unit 08

In this unit, we will do more work on English vowels and diphthongs, concentrating on differences between different dialects of English and the difficulties that native speakers of other languages typically encounter when trying to learn to English vowel system.

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit08_20251/

    

Week 09: Tuesday 03 June 2025 — Unit 09

In this unit, we will practise any remaining problems with English consonants and consider in particular the consonant clusters of English.

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit09_20251/

BLOCK 5 — AROUND THE SYLLABLE

    

Week 10: Tuesday 10 June 2025 — Unit 10

In this unit, we will carry on from the work of the previous week and practise the kinds of simplifications that occur when syllables rub up against one another.

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit10_20251/

    

Week 11: Tuesday 17 June 2025 — Unit 11

In this unit, we will look at the phonetics of word morphology, including the role of word stress.

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit11_20251/

    

Week 12: Tuesday 24 June 2025 — Unit 12

In this unit, we will be concerned with the rhythm of English.

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit12_20251/

BLOCK 6 — ABOVE THE SYLLABLE

    

Week 13: Tuesday 01 July 2025 — Unit 13

In this unit, we will look at the role of TONALITY and TONICITY: how speakers decide how much information to pack into one information unit, and how they indicate where the most important ‘new’ information is located.

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit13_20251/

    

Week 14: Tuesday 08 July 2025 — Unit 14

In this unit, we will study and practise the primary tones of English.

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit14_20251/

    

Week 15: Tuesday 14 July 2025 — Unit 15

In this unit, we will study and practise the secondary tones of English, and discuss the arrangements for the oral exam.

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/unit15_20251/

BLOCK 7 — ASSESSMENT

All the information you need about the oral exams will be sent to you by email and posted in the General channel of the MS Teams team for this course.

Scroll down further for the links to the listening exercises.

    

Listening Practice: Links

Local copies of videos for listening can be found here:

http://www.spence.saar.de/arcanum/phonetics/listening/videos_etc/

– ask the course leader to send you your login details.

Any local copies of the texts of those videos would be here:

http://www.spence.saar.de/arcanum/phonetics/listening/texts_etc/

The worksheets for some of the videos are here:

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/exercise_sheet_01-01/exercise_sheet_01-01.pdf

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/exercise_sheet_02-01/exercise_sheet_02-01.pdf

http://www.spence.saar.de/phonetics/exercise_sheet_11-07/exercise_sheet_11-07.pdf

LINKS TO VIDEOS FOR LISTENING PRACTICE: