Phonetics, Phonology, Teaching
| About | Publications | Research | Teaching | Resources | CV | etc |
As a teacher, I take it as my responsibility to continually improve my skills and to take part in the ongoing development of evidence-based teaching practices. To this end, I completed the Certificate of College Teaching Preparation at Yale’s Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, and I have been active in peer-learning workshops and classroom observations through LSA’s Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Special Interest Group and the English Linguistics department at HHU.
One of the most important things that instructors can do is to make our implicit assumptions as explicit as possible. We need to identify those academic skills that are rarely taught, and which we too often assume our students will already have. In my field, these include discipline-specific reading skills, interpreting visualizations, and statistical literacy. Some links and tools are available on my Resources page, and I am always looking for more areas that deserve attention.
At HHU, I have been part of two “E-learning Förderfonds” grants to develop standalone didactic materials. The first sought to address a problem in English Linguistics at HHU: students in intermediate and advanced courses needed revision of phonetics and phonology material from the introductory course. The grant allowed Lara Rüter and Julika Weber to develop online review units, which are now publicly available on OSF and ORCA.nrw. The second, currently underway, aims to develop online tutorials for making and analyzing recordings in the phonetics lab, in order to more easily involve students in research and primary data collection.
Linguistics is unusually well-suited for students to engage in original research from very early in their careers. Just by knowing a language, students can already access the data necessary to test many ideas in linguistics. The widespread availability of corpora and the relative accessibility of many experimental techniques put more seemingly complex methods in the hands of undergraduates.
Engaging in research allows students to naturally develop a wide range of skills, from critical analysis to formulating new ideas, theorizing to empirical testing, collaboration to communication. I particularly recommend the “CARE” framework: Collaborative Active-Learning Research-Based Education (Bjorndahl & Gibson 2022).
Several of my courses have been centered around a collaborative research project. At HHU, these ranged from a methods course for third-semseter undergraduates to two seminars for M.A. and advanced B.A. students. In those courses, students made recordings for a corpus of L2 English that is being prepared for public access.
From Fall 2015 through Spring 2020, I taught weekly (or more) at the Branford College Pottery Studio, serving as studio manager and a Graduate Affiliate of Branford College.