My publications fall into three categories
Feel free to download these articles but please note they are prepublication copies and may not be exactly identical to the published versions. If you wish to quote from these works, you should obtain the published version.
General interest
Fraser, H, and Schalley, A. 2009. Conceptualising Communication. Australian Journal of Linguistics.
This is part of a special issue arising from a workshop Conceptualising Communication - Building Cross-disciplinary Understanding in Human Communication Science run by Andrea Schalley and myself in 2005. Information on the other papers can be found here.
Many disciplines describe themselves as studying 'communication'. However observation of interdisciplinary discussion suggests that 'communication' may be conceptualized in different ways by different disciplines. This paper aims to promote mutual understanding among disciplines, not by proposing a universally valid definition of communication to which all disciplines should subscribe, but by, first, offering a set of questions that can be used to help disciplinary groups communicate their own views on communication to colleagues from other disciplines, and then creating a (preliminary) typology to map out the range of possible positions that can be taken in relation to those questions. Noting that academic disciplines have distinct cultures, the paper presents some concepts of intercultural communication as understood in applied linguistics that may be useful in facilitating interdisciplinary communication about communication.
Fraser, H. 2003. Issues in Transcription: Factors affecting the reliability of transcripts as evidence in legal cases. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 10 (2): 203-226.
The middle section gives an overview of human speech perception that people usually find quite interesting.
Fraser, H. to appear. Transcripts their use and abuse. in Selby, H. and Freckelton, I. Expert Evidence Sydney: Lawbook co
Transcription plays an important role in many parts of the legal process. For example:
- transcripts of courtroom proceedings provide a lasting public record of events,
- transcripts routinely accompany electronic records of interviews by police or others,
- transcripts accompany evidence presented in the form of audio or video recordings.
All of these artefacts are called ‘transcripts’, but there is clearly a significant difference in their status. While the accuracy of courtroom transcripts is accepted as a cornerstone of the legal process, the correct transcription of audio presented in evidence can be the subject of vigorous but ultimately unresolvable dispute. Consider, for example, David Eastman’s whispered soliloquy recorded by a listening device in his house after the shooting of Colin Winchester. Did it contain the words "I killed Winchester", or were the words rather "I kept watching her”? There is no way to be absolutely certain.
Between these two extremes lie many points on a long continuum of accuracy and verifiability. In using transcripts of various kinds, it is clearly essential to locate them at the appropriate point in that continuum. This is not only to avoid giving too much credence to potentially inaccurate transcripts of barely audible recordings. Treating courtroom transcripts as no more reliable than the Eastman transcript would cause problems at least as great.
In order to make and use the necessary distinctions among transcripts of varying degrees of reliability, it is first necessary to set up a framework within which the creation and interpretation of transcripts can be understood. That is the task of the first part of this chapter. Later sections consider factors that affect the reliability of transcripts, and put forward suggested procedures for creating and evaluating transcripts to be used in court.
Fraser, Helen. in press. The role of native speakers in providing language analysis for the determination of the origin of asylum seekers. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law.
This paper speaks to a debate which has arisen across various branches of linguistics (see Eades, 2008) regarding the relative levels of responsibility that should be given to (a) qualified linguists with professional expertise in a particular language, and (b) 'educated native speakers' of the language, in conducting Language Analysis for the Determination of the regional or social Origin of asylum seekers (LADO). It reviews existing evidence from the phonetic and sociolinguistic literature regarding the reliability of accent judgments by linguists and non-linguists. It argues that, while LADO is a valid form of assistance to offer in the asylum process, as in other branches of forensic linguistics, careful evaluation of its limitations, in general and in specific cases, is crucial. The paper concludes by calling for (a) a proper research program to investigate people's actual abilities in recognising, discriminating and identifying accents under various sociolinguistic conditions; (b) collaboration between LADO agencies and linguists to develop analysis and testing procedures; and (c) a system of accreditation by an independent, international authority for the agencies that carry out LADO.
Fraser, H. 1996. Guy-dance with pro-nun-see-ay-shun. English Today 12 (3): 28-37.
Teaching pronunciation and literacy
Fraser, H. 2001. Teaching Pronunciation: A handbook for teachers and trainers. Sydney: TAFE-NSW Access Division
This Handbook was commissioned by TAFE NSW, and funded under the ANTA Adult Literacy National Project by the Commonwealth through the Department of Education Training and Youth Affairs. It is the product of a two-month series of professional development seminars involving teachers and workplace trainers who work with ESL learners. It includes practical advice and discussion based on these seminars, as well as participants' reactions and experiences with the methods suggested.I was particularly fortunate in the group of teachers I worked with on this project. One in particular, Ros Cartwright, has gone on to do a lot more work on pronunciation since then. Read more about Roslyn Cartwright here.
Fraser, H. 2004. Teaching Pronunciation: A guide for teachers of English as a second language. CD ROM funded under the ANTA Adult Literacy National Project by the Commonwealth through the Department of Education Training and Youth Affairs.
This CD is for native speakers of English who teach learners of English as a second language. It is intended to help you to help learners with their pronunciation. It is not a traditional phonology course. Rather it offers experiences to give you insight into the problems learners face with pronunciation. It provides and discusses a number of interesting auditory experiences, demonstrating how, though the segmental and suprasegmental structure of English may be very obvious to native speakers, it can be anything but obvious to ESL learners. This leads on to the important principle that most pronunciation difficulties have cognitive, rather than physical, causes: when learners make mistakes, they actually think, subconsciously, that they are simply imitating the native pronunciation. The differences that are so apparent to the native speaker are insignificant to the learner - until they learn to pay attention to them. The last module contains 17 audio and video demonstrations of real learners, and discussion of approaches that might be taken to helping them. Please contact me for information on how to obtain this CD.
Please note This CD is aimed specifically at native speakers of English, and draws heavily on their native speaker intuitions. It may not be so relevant to non-native speakers who teach English. If you need materials for non-native speaking teachers of English, please contact me.
Fraser, H. 2006. Helping teachers help students with pronunciation. Prospect: A journal of Australian TESOL 21 (1): 80-94.
This paper introduces a theoretical framework for understanding speech and pronunciation based on insights from Cognitive Phonology. In this framework, pronunciation is seen as a cognitive skill. In learning a cognitive skill, practice is essential, but its value depends on students having the right concept of what it is they are practising. Helping students form concepts appropriate to the new language is therefore a crucial part of a language teacher's role. The paper starts with an informal overview of the role of concepts and concept formation in cognition. It then considers how well-known observations about pronunciation and pronunciation learning can be understood from this perspective, and suggests some principles which can account for and extend these observations. Finally it compares the cognitive approach with more familiar mainstream views of phonology, finding them not to be in conflict but to offer significantly and usefully different perspectives, appropriate to different applications.
Fraser, H. in press. Pronunciation as categorization: The role of contrast in teaching English /r/ AND /l/. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics.
This paper reports an experiment designed to test the effectiveness of explicit use of contrast in teaching the distinction between /r/ and /l/ to Asian learners of English. The experiment uses computer-based training modelled after Lively, et al. (1994), in which users hear one word from a minimal pair (e.g. "fruit/flute") while simultaneously seeing both words on the screen, then respond with a keystroke to indicate which word they think they heard. The present experiment compares the effectiveness of two different kinds of feedback. In Condition 1, after giving their response, users hear the correct word once (as in Lively, et al. 1994), while in Condition 2, they are able to hear both words as many times as they like, under their own keyboard control. Results suggest that Condition 2 produces greater improvement in perception, and that this improvement translates to production, even though production has not been explicitly trained. These findings are interpreted within a Cognitive Linguistics framework, with notes on their relevance for teaching within a communicative or socio-cultural approach.
Fraser, H. 2008. Pronouncing on the right side of the brain. Teacher Trainer Journal 22.
Many English teachers avoid teaching pronunciation because they feel they do not have sufficient knowledge of phonetics and phonology to explain the rules of pronunciation to students (Macdonald, 2002). This is unfortunate, since knowledge of phonological rules is not essential to helping students acquire pronunciation skills. Indeed, too much focus on phonology can mean students end up knowing the rules - but stating them in pronunciation which violates those very rules. Readers of this journal will require little persuasion (Arnold, 2003, Ur, 1990) that what students most need is not information about the pronunciation of English, but practice in the doing of English pronunciation (by which I mean not just segmental articulation but all aspects of speaking clearly). This practice can be provided to a useful extent through classroom activities which simulate real situations in which students need to use English pronunciation (Ellis, 2003). As many teachers who use such 'implicit' pronunciation teaching methods will attest, however, just 'doing' is not always enough to enable learners to achieve the proficiency they desire. At certain points, a pronunciation teacher, like a coach of any skill (Morley, 1991), needs to provide explicit feedback and guidance on learners' performance. The question is, what kind of feedback and guidance is appropriate in coaching the skill of pronunciation? In this short article I would like to explore an analogy between teaching pronunciation and teaching drawing that might offer a way for teachers to develop answers to this question suitable to their own classroom situations.
Buckland, C, and Fraser, H. 2008. Phonological literacy for teachers: Preparing teachers for the challenge of a balanced approach to literacy education. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 31:59-73.
The report of The National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (2005) points to the false dichotomy between phonics and whole language and recommends a balanced approach to literacy education. Following this recommendation requires that student teachers be equipped with a sound understanding of "phonemic awareness and phonics" as part of a range of teaching strategies upon which they can draw. The NITL acknowledges that "provision of such a repertoire of teaching skills is a challenge for teacher education institutions". The present paper showcases one response to this challenge - an online module designed in collaboration between a cognitive phonologist and a teacher educator. The module, 'Teaching Foundational Literacy', aims to show how an understanding of cognitive phonology can contribute to informed, professional teaching using a balanced approach. The present paper discusses how cognitive phonology transcends the sterile debate of the 'reading wars' by giving meaning and context a central place in phonological theory, rather than putting phonology and meaning at opposite ends of a continuum. It then previews the four topics of the self-paced online module (Spelling and Meaning, Phonemic Awareness, Towards Phonics, Beyond Phonics) and presents results of a student evaluation.
Fraser, H. 2000. Coordinating improvements in pronunciation teaching for adult learners of English as a second language. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, Department of Education Training and Youth Affairs.
The research reported here had its origin in the observation that many learners of English as a second language have major difficulties with English pronunciation, often even after years of English lessons, with concomitant major disadvantages in all areas of life, notably in employment.
This observation, combined with the observation that many English language teachers have major problems in teaching pronunciation, prompted a proposal to review the situation of pronunciation teaching across a range of contexts, and to recommend a coordinated strategy for improving the situation.
The project involved a survey based on informal interviews with teachers, learners, administrators, researchers, teacher trainers, and policy makers whose work relates to English language teaching in a wide range of contexts, in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. Details on who was interviewed and when are available in Section 9. The project also involved creation of a computer disk for learners seeking to improve their English pronunciation; details on this are available in Section 8.
Fraser, H. 2000. Tips for teaching pronunciation: Recording students' voices. ATESOL Journal (Canberra, ACT).
Hannam, Rachel, Helen Fraser and Brian Byrne. 2006. The sbelling of sdops: Preliterate Children’s Spelling of Stops After /s/. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Newly literate children have a tendency to spell s-stop sequences in words like spin, stop, sky with B, D, G (SBIN, SDOP, SGY), rather than with standard P, T, K. This observation potentially has implications for theories of English phonology as well as of language and literacy acquisition. Understanding these implications, however, requires data about the spelling preferences of preliterate children. In this study, a training-and-transfer design was used to test these spelling preferences in preliterate children. Results confirm that these children relate words with stops after /s/ to words with initial /b, d, g/ rather than to words with initial /p, t, k/. The paper outlines several possible interpretations: that preliterate children have a different phonemic analysis from adults, that they believe spelling represents archiphonemes that they believe spelling represents allophones, and that their early spelling attempts track the phonetic surface. The data suggest rejection of the second interpretation and in our view favour the last over the remaining interpretations. Several theoretical issues are raised that need to be resolved before a full account of the data can be offered.
Theory
Fraser, Helen. in prep. Applied Phonetics and Phonology. Invited contribution to Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics, ed. James Simpson.
The last century has seen a proliferation of theories of phonetics and phonology, including development of the phoneme concept, the structuralist approach, many branches of generative and post-generative theory (non-linear phonology, optimality phonology), and a range of approaches defining themselves in opposition to generative thought (Basic Linguistic Theory, Cognitive Phonology, sociophonetics).
The same period has also seen an increase in the number of contexts in which knowledge of phonetics and phonology can offer great practical assistance, including many new computer applications, vast increases in human applications such as language and literacy education and teacher education, through to forensic, medical and language-description contexts.
One question that can often be hard to answer, then, is: which theory is most appropriate for a particular application? This chapter therefore starts by outlining a metatheoretical framework, based on very general Saussurean principles, within which phonetics and phonology can be located vis a vis other branches of linguistics, and the various branches of phonetics and phonology can be categorised. Particular attention will be given to defining the difference between phonetics and phonology, and relating this to similar distinctions in other branches of linguistics.
Such a framework allows consideration of the range of questions phonetics and phonology has addressed, as well as location of gaps - questions which, though relevant and important, to date have received relatively little attention. This process reveals that questions relating to the human applications of language and literacy education, have been significantly neglected. Of course, phonetics and phonology have had significant research programs devoted to first and second language acquisition, but the questions addressed by these have tended to be ‘theory-driven’ - seeking implications for universal grammar, for example - rather than ‘application-driven’ - arising directly from a teaching and learning context.
This has left practitioners within these human applications rather on their own to develop effective approaches to the teaching and learning of ‘speaking and spelling’. Some excellent work has been done in this regard, especially in the past two decades, which will be thoroughly documented in this chapter.
It is fair to say, however, that much of this work has been rather atheoretical, sometimes avowedly so, sampling an eclectic mix of concepts as they seem appropriate in different contexts. This approach is certainly understandable in view of the situation described above. However, it is not optimal. For one thing, it means that some key knowledge from phonetics and phonology (especially the true difference between phonetics and phonology, and some less obvious but important limitations on concepts of phoneme, syllable, etc) has not been incorporated into applied phonetics and phonology as effectively as it might have been. For another, it can lead to fragmentation of scarce resources, with similar questions being addressed in different ways.
With the knowledge gained from the teaching-based research described above, it is now possible to start developing theories which arise directly from phonetic and phonological applications, rather than simply ‘applying’ concepts and techniques developed in a quite different context. This approach has already been followed successfully in other branches of applied linguistics, which provide useful models. In particular, it is possible to adapt theories such as sociocultural theory to take account of the less well-known aspects of phonetics and phonology described above.
Fraser, H. in press. Cognitive theory as a tool for teaching pronunciation. Plenary presentation at 33rd International LAUD Symposium, Cognitive Approaches to Second/Foreign Language Processing: Theory and Pedagogy, March 10 - 13, 2008, Landau/Pfalz (Germany).
This paper starts by recognising that, in general, pronunciation is the least successfully taught of the second language skills, and suggesting this indicates a need for a better theoretical framework within which teachers can understand and facilitate learners' acquisition of L2 pronunciation. Structural-generative theory, which has been dominant in phonology for some time, has limited application in this domain. However, applying the principles of Cognitive Phonology may lead to improved results. It then reviews the basic Cognitive Phonology principle: 'the signifier is a concept', and explains how the literacy bias (the tendency of those literate in an alphabetic script to believe that speech is a string of discrete phonemes) makes this principle more difficult to grasp than the very similar but far more widely understood principle that the signified is a concept. Discussion continues to consider implications of this idea for language teachers: phonemes, and other units of phonology, are not real things but abstract concepts. Teaching pronunciation thus involves facilitating concept formation. The paper then moves to consider some implications for theory of the observation that the concept of phoneme is derived from prior understanding of words and other larger units of phonology. It concludes by suggesting there may be productive parallels between the arguments presented here regarding the relationship between words and phonemes, and arguments advanced by Construction Grammar in regard to the relationship between lexis and grammar, whose implications for second language teaching are explored by other papers in this volume.
Fraser, H. (2007). Categories and Concepts in Phonology: Theory and Practice. In Schalley, A. & D. Khlentzos (eds.) Mental States. Vol.2: Language and Cognitive. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
The first part of this chapter brings together some ideas about the role of words and concepts that are widely agreed in theories of language and cognition, and suggests it would be reasonable to expect these ideas to be applied to the words and concepts used within those theories. The second part argues that this is not always the case. Theorists sometimes use words and concepts in a way that is at odds with their own theories about language and cognition. An explanation for this is offered, and a method for detecting and correcting problems that arise from it is proposed. The focus is phonology, and its application in human (as opposed to computational) domains, such as pronunciation teaching.
Fraser, H. 2006. Phonological Concepts and Concept Formation: Metatheory, Theory and Application. International Journal of English Studies 6 (2): 55-75.
This paper presents an overview of Phenomenological Phonology (PP), including its metatheory, theory and application, for comparison with Cognitive Phonology (CP). While PP and CP are in close agreement at the theory level, there are some significant differences at the level of metatheory. PP considers phonological terms (such as phoneme and word) to be words like any others, and gives detailed consideration to the concepts behind such terms. It also considers pronunciation to be a form of behaviour, driven by concepts created through general concept-formation processes. This has important consequences for practical application in the areas of pronunciation and literacy teaching.