A System for Independent E-learning of Practical Phonetics

This paper presents a web-based system that supports students in their learning of phonetic transcription and production. It allows students to create their own exercises from an integrated database of recordings, according to their specific learning needs. Every recording in the system has been meta-tagged. For example, a cardinal vowel will have, among others, the tags ‘vowel’ and ‘cardinal’. Exercises are automatically generated by the system by searching the meta-tags which are stored in a database. The paper describes the types of recording in the system (individual phones, English words, nonsense words and short phrases), and the options from which the students can choose to create and customise their transcription and production exercises. It discusses how feedback to the student is handled, and the conventions that have been used in the transcription of the recordings. Finally, it describes the maintenance aspects of the system, as well as some of the technical details.