Tools and techniques to teach phonetic transcription online

Abstract

Despite the global impact of the digital revolution, the use of technological advancements in education remains underexplored. Teachers and students have incorporated technology in the classroom mainly as a secondary support to invigorate learning, and remote teaching has been applied in specific and rather isolated situations. However, the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic around the globe has turned the tables, and nowadays most of the students worldwide are learning online. This situation has forced the adaptation of all types of courses to a virtual setting so that learners could keep studying from home during lockdown. Consequently, the tools and techniques used in face-to-face lectures had to be reassessed to guarantee their validity when teaching remotely, and new digital resources had to be tested to ensure that learning was not jeopardized. Pronunciation instruction is not an exception. Despite the wide range of multimedia material available on the internet to practice transcription, not much has been investigated on how to include it in class, especially when teaching it online. This paper aims at examining the tools and methods applied in an undergraduate pronunciation course in order to provide helpful and inspiring ideas for those practitioners who must teach pronunciation remotely.