INTERNET-ASSISTED PHONETICS EDUCATION. THE SOUNDS OF CATALAN (HTTP://WWW.UB.EDU/SONSCATALA/)

The purpose of this talk is to present the website Els sons del català (The sounds of Catalan), available at the address http://www.ub.edu/sonscatala/. This website has been developed by a team of professors from different Catalan universities and contains a set of resources and materials designed in order to a) assist Catalan phonetics teaching in those courses of secondary and higher education which have this discipline as an object of study or work method; b) allow students to learn this discipline in an autonomous fashion, consistent with the guidelines of the European Higher Education Area; and c) to improve the teaching and learning of Catalan as a foreign language.

The website includes an initial webpage with a Catalan sound chart animated in Flash which contains the Catalan consonants and vowels distributed according to their point and manner of articulation. When the user places the cursor on each of these sounds, a small window with a description of the articulatory characteristics of the sound as well as the origin of the phonetic symbol that represents it is displayed. When the user places the cursor on each of the points and manners of articulation a basic description of them is also displayed in a pop-up window. By clicking on each phonetic symbol, the user can access a second webpage that contains a) a video file in which a native speaker utters the sound as it occurs in different words; b) a Flash-animated articulatory diagram that represents the movements of the articulatory organs of the vocal tract when producing this sound; and c) a spectrogram and oscillogram accompanied by sound files corresponding to a set words each containing the sound in question as pronounced by native speakers. Our intention is to expand the website with information about the sounds of other Catalan dialects and other Romance languages, to translate the text into other languages, such as English and German, and to include a set of interactive exercises so that the user can apply the theoretical knowledge he or she has acquired.

In this talk we are going to present the website itself as well as our own experience in teaching Catalan phonetics using this new interface.