Phonetics is studied by students on a variety of courses, where it may be either elective or obligatory, and its inclusion in the syllabus can be implicit or explicit. In all cases, however, the teaching of phonetics must take into account the needs of students in relation to the rest of their programme, and the use they will make of phonetics in their further studies or work.Here we focus on the explicit teaching of phonetics, as experienced by students of, for example, linguistics and speech and language therapy. We consider key issues in teaching and learning across all aspects of phonetics, including theory, ear-training and production, transcription of segments and prosodic features, and acoustics. The chapter is underpinned by both phonetics research, where it exists, and that from broader educational research and theoretical perspectives. Finally, we consider future directions for the teaching of phonetics, mapping this against the United Kingdom Professional Standards Framework for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

How is speech produced, perceived and processed? How is it used by individuals and speech communities, and how does it change over time? How is speech learnt, by first- and second-language speakers, and how does it present when it is disordered? These questions, alongside many more, are of interest to researchers in the broad field of phonetics. Phonetics has a long history, dating at least from writing systems in the ancient world, and has continually evolved as a discipline in response to new theories, methods and technologies (see, for example, Heselwood et al., 2013, for a full historical overview). Today, the field is broad, and interdisciplinary, as shown by the coverage of phonetics journals and conferences, and the chapters in this handbook.

Key learning areas

In this unit we will:

• discover what phonetics is all about

• explore the relationship between sound and spelling

• find out how to count the number of sounds in a word

• learn how to divide sounds up into vowels and consonants.

Introduction

When most of us think about language and speech, we tend to think about the way words are written. Because we spend so much time learning to read and spell, and are constantly told how important spelling is, we often focus on spelling rather than on speech or sound.

However, this book is about phonetics, the study of speech sounds. This means that throughout this book we will be thinking about the way humans produce speech, and what speech sounds like, rather than the written form of language. We are going to start in this section of the book by thinking about individual sounds, build up to see how sounds vary in words, and, in the final section, look at the things that can happen when words are put together in sentences.

In fact, one of the most important things to do in the study of phonetics is to realise that sound and spelling are very different things. As we will see in this unit, spelling is often a poor guide to a word???s pronunciation.