Phonetics and CSD Programs

In 2001, Michael Moran and James Fitch published an article titled Phonological Awareness Skills of University Students: Implications for Teaching Phonetics. I first read the article in Summer 2010 and have thought of it often. When I was a Senior in the UWG Speech-Language Pathology Undergrad program, I offered Phonetic tutoring sessions for the rising juniors. I took a liking to the different ‘language’ phonetics offers, and thought I could lend some help.

What is most striking about the article is the “Phonological Awareness Tasks” which the authors tried on 21 CSD students taking a phonetics course.

The tasks look at:

• Phoneme Switching (“had bear” = “bad hair”
• Phonetic Reversal (“sick” = “kiss)
• Phoneme Counting (soul = 3 phonemes)
• Vowel Matching (“shoe” matches “two”)