New Tools for Teaching Phonetics

This paper deals with the integration of technical progress in the last decade into phonetics teaching at the undergraduate and the graduate levels, drawing on personal experience. Phonetics has profited most from such progress. Some points that I feel are most important are reviewed: the systematic use of PowerPoint and video projection during the class, with conduction of on-line experiments; access to more and more sounds, speech data base, film and video resources and availability of userfriendly speech analysis and multilingual speech synthesis software, and Webcam meeting. There is a general improvement in communication through access to local and international discussions lists, motoring search engines, specialized websites, on-line bibliographies with abstracts, articles, journals. To conclude, technical progress allowed for more engaging undergraduate courses, and broadened a lot the horizon of the graduate students. Basic pedagogy has not changed much and there are some new problems emerging.