Phonetics

The first impression that someone gets from another person's English has nothing to do with how impressive that person's grammar might be or how large their vocabulary is, but rather with how natural their pronunciation sounds. In both theoretical and practical sessions, our phonetics module targets the full range of factors that go into accurate speech production in English. The theory part deals with the articulation of British and American English speech sounds, phonological basics like the analysis of phonemes, their realisation in connected speech, and selected aspects of syllable structure and speech rhythm. These classes are taught by one of our departmental experts on linguistics. For the practical classes, students can choose between British English and American English. In these practical sessions, which are taught by native speakers or by colleagues with a native-like command of English, students are given the chance to distinguish between phonemes, to practice word and sentence stress, to transcribe words and short texts into the International Phonetic Alphabet, and to improve their overall pronunciation so that they can feel more confident when speaking English.