Course outline
Convenor: Prof. J. S. Coleman
Wednesdays, 2–3.30 p.m., weeks 1–6
Target audience: MPhil students interested in offering the experimental phonetics option paper B (vii) in Trinity Term 2021. Please note that this option is not available to MSt students.
In view of the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis, these classes will be conducted entirely online in Trinity Term 2020. Arrangements for on-line teaching are developing rapidly, but at present my intention is to provide course materials (handouts and presentations) via my website, as I usually do, and to arrange the weekly meetings at the usual class time of Wednesday 2–3.30 p.m. in weeks 1–6, using Microsoft Teams for videoconferencing.
Students interested in participating in this course are therefore asked to email me in advance of the first meeting, in order to be added to the group. Attendance at the classes does not in and of itself register you to "take" the B(vii) assessed option; if you want to follow the course to see how it goes, and whether it's an option you want to choose as an assessment, that's fine by me. The only thing I ask is that everyone who joins in plays their part in the classes, as they have a practical aspect.
The rubric for assessment of paper B(vii) Experimental Phonetics is by submission of "A written report of between 5,000 and 7,500 words on the design and execution of an original research project." "Original" here means that the experiment or study has not been done before; it does not mean that every candidate has to design and carry out an entirely separate project from everyone else (that is permissible, but I do not encourage it because of supervision considerations); it is not, after all, a second MPhil thesis! Rather, in these classes we shall work together collaboratively as a research group; I shall suggest the topic of the investigation, and provide research training in the methods required to carry it out.
In some years, the classes focus on design of the experiment, and may get little further than setting up a pilot with a few subjects. In other years, we use data that is already available, having been collected previously, and the classes focus on questions of measurement and analysis in order to test one or more hypotheses. This year, because it will not be possible to bring subjects into the lab to collect data, we shall use pre-existing data. After planning what we need to measure in order to address the hypothesis/es, we'll divide up the work of making the measurements between everyone in the class (me included). By sharing it out, we can work on more data than one person could do individually; we will then pool our measurements together, and I will guide us through the statistical analysis of the data. Upon that guidance, students will carry out the statistical analysis themselves, independently: this is because the write-up of your own analysis of the data will be an important part of the report (assuming that you decide to do it as an assessed option). If you do decide to take the option, you could then work on the write-up during the Long Vacation, or in the subsequent Michaelmas or Hilary Terms, depending on your other workload. At that point, I can give individual feedback on one pre-final draft of the report, before you then polish it up and prepare it for submission by the due date, Friday of week 5 of Trinity Term 2021.
The programme for the course is roughly this: