Kevin Watson, School of Social and Political Sciences
Redesigning and implementing innovative online revision/assessment exercise
of the new 200 level Japanese language course
Synopsis of the Project
Transcribing spoken English using the International Phonetic Alphabet is a foundational skill
which must be mastered by students on Linguistics courses. To be good at this, students must
practice transcription outside of class, but autonomous learning is hindered by the fact that most
textbooks transcribe speech in a Received Pronunciation or BBC accent. This is rather different
form the New Zealand English accent I, so students find it difficult to check their own
transcriptions against the examples in textbooks. The objective of this project is to create a large
collection of phonetic transcriptions of (i) single words (ii) short phrases and (iii) longer
paragraphs in both New Zealand English and Received Pronunciation.