Sociophonetic Project Module

Learning Outcomes

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• The ability to apply and evaluate appropriate methods to the study of English dialects in order to study testable hypotheses
• The ability to formulate and defend personal opinion clearly and persuasively and with recourse to appropriate evidence
• The ability to define, present and exemplify theoretical concepts regarding English phonetic and phonology
• The ability to engage with subject matter and received opinion in breadth and depth
• The ability to select, synthesise and focus pertinent data; to select, synthesise and focus information from theoretical and methodological source material
• The ability to relate knowledge from sociolinguistic theory to broader debates within the field of English linguistics and sociolinguistics
• The ability to select and collect suitable variables from empirical data in order to test, analyse and present specific hypotheses

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• Social differentiation and variation (class, gender, age etc.) in spoken discourse
• The relationship between language and the mind in terms of dialect and accent acquisition
• The phonological and phonetic structure of contemporary English, including reference to morphological items
• The analysis of spoken discourse, including orthographic conventions and phonetic variation
• Current sociolinguistic theory; phonetic, dialectal difference between regional and global varieties of English

Subject Specific Practical Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Develop competencies with a range of general computer software, such as Excel and Audacity, as well as with specialist phonetics software such as Praat, DARLA and advance statistical programming software such as R.
• Gain skills and expertise in phonetic coding of sociolinguistic data
• Gain skills and expertise in multivariate analysis of sociolinguistic data

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Develop skills in analysing and presenting various genres of data both cogently and concisely
• Gain skills and expertise in reflecting on your own learning processes and using feedback cumulatively
• Gain skills in communicating effectively in a long and complex piece of academic writing
• Gain skills in abstracting and synthesising complex information and data and organising the results appropriately
• Gain skills and expertise in working with others to collect, analyse and present appropriate data
• Gain skills in producing academic writing to required conventions

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.