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Speech science comes alive for distance students

September 16, 2005

FraserH.thumb.jpgThe science of speech is coming alive for students of The University of New England living around the world.

A linguist in the University’s School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Dr Helen Fraser (pictured here), has been using new software that lets her involve students in “live classrooms” via the Internet. With the software she can play, analyse and discuss speech sounds with students in real time.

Dr Fraser’s phonetics course, “Speech and Communication”, is part of UNE’s pioneering Master of Arts (Applied Linguistics) program, taught as a fully online degree program to 200 students in more than 20 countries.

Phonetics has always been considered difficult to teach by distance education because it is a subject that really needs face-to-face interaction. In learning how to interpret spectrograms (“voiceprints”), for example, students need to hear words and see the spectrograms simultaneously, while hearing an explanation of how the spectrogram represents each sound. Dr Fraser is now able to provide all this in an online “classroom”. Students see her actually using the speech analysis program on her own computer, and can discuss the analyses with her as they happen.

“If you hear someone explain while everything’s in front of you it takes ten minutes to understand it,” she said, “but if you have to get the explanation out of a book it can take hours.”

There are 60 students doing the phonetics course, in countries including the United States, Korea, China and Japan as well as Australia and New Zealand. Their reactions to the first live classroom late last month were wholly positive, with comments like: “I might actually have a grasp of it now! It was also nice to be able to put a voice to the name ‘Helen Fraser’.” Also: “Seems like a pretty cool way to enhance the whole online learning thing.”

Dr Fraser was part of a small group trying out the new software (“Elluminate”) as a tool for distance education in languages and several other subjects in UNE’s Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. “The possibilities for teaching in a wide range of disciplines seem endless,” she said.

In order to make this system possible, staff of UNE’s Teaching and Learning Centre (Rupert Collister, Catherine Clarke and Stephen Swinsburg) helped set Dr Fraser up to “share” her speech analysis program for interactive online learning. “The TLC folks were great,” Dr Fraser said. “Now, what’s always been thought of as the hardest subject to teach by distance education is something even overseas students can enjoy.”


Media contact: Dr Helen Fraser, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, UNE (02) 6773 3318 or Jim Scanlan, Public Relations, UNE (02) 6773 3049. For information on "Elluminate", go to: www.elluminate.com.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at September 16, 2005 04:57 PM