Solo Project: Elaine Chaika

Name: Elaine Chaika, Ph.D.
Phone: x2467
Dept: English
Email: echaika@providence.edu

Resources Requested

Stipend Academic Year: Yes, $1180.00; I foresee spending many hours both during the academic year and the summer developing these materials, testing them out, and revamping them.
ElementK: $70.00; I want to take the courses in PowerPoint, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver
Software: $150.00; Cool Edit or comparable program which provides a spectographic picture of sound waves produced in speech
Equipment: $50.00; I may need a more sensitive microphone than the one that came with my office computer.
Student Assistant: $1,550.00; It will probably take about 200 hours of work to key in the symbols of the phonetic alphabet, which must be done by using ASCII codes, and to prepare the animated slides that demonstrate the spectographs of speech and each phonetic symbol. I foresee a minimum of 200 slides for this project

Total: $3000.00

Project Info

Equipment Use in the Future: My phonetics students will be able to produce spectographs of their own speech and compare them to classmates.

Start Date: As soon as I can find the student assistant.
End Date: August 31, 2003

Milestones/Deadlines: My becoming proficient in PowerPoint after using the online training would be the first milestone. Getting the phonetic symbols onto slides would be the second. Then the actual animation of the symbols and their combination with the spectographic information would culminate the project.

Deliverables

Angel Course: These slides will be used in Linguistics 201 for the unit on phonetics and phonology. Anybody else who teaches phonetics might also want to use these slides.

Multimedia CD: It might be best if we transferred the 200+ PowerPoint slides to a CD and play them from that medium.

Change in Practice: I would like to create a Web page with the phonetics slides on them so that students can review them when they are studying. Eventually, I want to do an online syllabus and have a link to the phonetics material.

Primary Objective

Phonetics is a highly technical area in which several of our students require expertise. It involves complete reconception of what a student thinks of as a word or even a sound. Not only do students have to sharpen their perceptions of speech sounds, but they must also master a difficult phonetic alphabet so that they can transcribe speech accurately, as well as read materials written in this alphabet on myriad subjects pertinent to various majors. It must be emphasized that putting the characters of the International Phonetic Alphabet is a very time consuming and difficult job in itself. Even with a program like SIL's Tavestock, the most complete one I know of, most of the characters have to be created by inputting their ASCII code.

I propose to create upwards of two hundred Power Point slides which show spectrographic images of the sounds of English and selected European languages as they are being pronounced, and have these correlate with the phonetic symbol representing that sound wave pattern. Furthermore, I wish to have slides which show how a sound is decomposed into the phonetic elements that make it up (allophones) and others which show the allophones merging to create their phonemes (the sounds people are conscious of hearing). These are all difficult concepts to teach and I believe added visual and audio representations of them will greatly enhance my teaching of phonetics.