On Tuesday 23rd of May, colleagues from Phonetics travelled to Blackpool Sixth Form to deliver two sessions. Dr Claire Nance, Maya Dewhurst, Lois Fairclough, and visiting researcher Dr Anton Malmi, headed to Blackpool bright and early to deliver a series of workshops for the year 12 and 13 students. Students from English Language, Criminology, Law, and Biology attended the workshops.
We were invited to Blackpool Sixth by former English Language and Creative Writing student, Alan Hebbes. Alan is now an A-Level English Language teacher at the college, so was very excited to show some of his students what Lancaster has to offer!
The first of the sessions was delivered by PhD student, Lois Fairclough. This session focussed on forensic linguistics and phonetics. This involved analysing text message data, as well as introducing students to forensic phonetics. This introduced the students to some real casework data which has formed part of widely known police investigations. Students also got the chance to see how the forensic domain in linguistics and phonetics is expanding, due to a series of new challenges such as social media, and artificial intelligence.
The second session was a Phonetics session, which included aspects of sociophonetics, aerodynamics, and articulatory phonetics. There were three “stations” set up for the students to rotate around.
Firstly, Dr Claire Nance led a station which looked at sociolinguistics and phonetics. This included an accent and dialect quiz. Also on this station, Dr Anton Malmi (a visiting researcher from the University of Tartu, Estonia) discussed language attitudes with the students, and how accent can influence life around us.
Secondly, Maya shared techniques from her PhD project. This involves measuring nasality using aerodynamic and acoustic approaches. The students got to try out measuring nasality, using techniques Maya has developed during her PhD project, while learning about some of the biological processes which enable nasal airflow.
The final station involved some anatomy and articulatory phonetics, lead by Lois. The ultrasound machine was taken to Blackpool to demonstrate what the tongue looks like as we speak in real time. Many students had a go at using the ultrasound and looking at their tongue move! Then, students got to see what the vocal folds look like when we speak – certainly something you can’t forget once you have seen it!
Students commented that they didn’t realise that linguistics had such a vast array of topics, and were fascinated by the mechanisms of the human voice.
Thank you to Alan and Blackpool Sixth for having us – hopefully we might be seeing some of you soon here in Lancaster!