This podcast from Saarland University offers challenging listening opportunities for upper intermediate to advanced learners and fascinating topics to do with the English language and culture. Published bi-weekly, with a growing archive of nearly 100 episodes, the podcast can be used in the context of traditional, e-learning, or blended learning courses as well as self-study approaches.

TED Studies, created in collaboration with Wiley, are curated video collections — supplemented by rich educational materials — for students, educators and self-guided learners. In Visualizing Data, TED speakers shake up statistics with elegant, dynamic representations that make mountains of data comprehensible — and even exciting. Learn how to visualize data and present complicated statistics in elegant and captivating ways. Relevant areas of interest, study and coursework include: information design, demography, statistical literacy, economics, sociology, media studies, linguistics, meteorology and computer science.

The goal of this course is to prepare you to engage in experimental investigations of questions related to linguistic theory, focusing on phonetics and phonology.

This course explores topics related to the representation and expression of propositional attitudes (e.g. belief, knowledge, and desires) and speech acts (e.g. saying and asking) in natural language. The main focus will be on semantics of predicates such as believe, know, want, say, ask, etc. Other topics will include the syntax of main and embedded clauses and formal representation of the pragmatics of conversation. The course provides practice in written and oral communication.

This course introduces students to the theory and practice of modeling phonology, with an empirical focus on modeling the discovery of static phonotactics, the discovery of alternations, learning in the midst of variation and exceptions, and the discovery of gradient patterns. This course is also intended to provide hands-on experience with various aspects of using and developing models, including preparing training data, running simulations, and interpreting their results.

This article is a brief overview of linguistic issues relating to transliteration and transcription procedures. The document discusses differences between transliteration and transcription as well as areas of technology application for the two. A document that shows unicode font codes for each letter of the Arabic alphabet and five different transliteration schemes is also available for free download.

The UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive includes samples taken from Egyptian, Iraqi, Najdi, North and South Levantine, and Tunisian dialects. The Arabic recordings consist almost exclusively of word lists read aloud to illustrate small differences in the pronunciation of the words. The Phonetics Laboratory includes recordings of hundreds of languages and provides them for free as source materials for phonetic and phonological research. Phonetic transcriptions are included alongside the recordings as are translations and scans of original field notes where relevant.

This text is a practical guide for linguists, and programmers, who work with data in multilingual computational environments. We introduce the basic concepts needed to understand how writing systems and character encodings function, and how they work together at the intersection between the Unicode Standard and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Although these standards are often met with frustration by users, they nevertheless provide language researchers and programmers with a consistent computational architecture needed to process, publish and analyze lexical data from the world's languages. Thus we bring to light common, but not always transparent, pitfalls which researchers face when working with Unicode and IPA. Having identified and overcome these pitfalls involved in making writing systems and character encodings syntactically and semantically interoperable (to the extent that they can be), we created a suite of open-source Python and R tools to work with languages using orthography profiles that describe author- or document-specific orthographic conventions. In this cookbook we describe a formal specification of orthography profiles and provide recipes using open source tools to show how users can segment text, analyze it, identify errors, and to transform it into different written forms for comparative linguistics research.

The VAVA is a collecion of royalty-free audio and video files for teachers to use in their own creative exercises. We have also developed a small number of sample exercises that utilize material from the VAVA. The LCTL Project encourages teachers of all LCTLs to cooperate in developing new VAVA exercises using audio or video materials. Individual exercises might be very simple listening practice, or they might be more complex, integrating sounds, video clips into reading, writing, speaking and listening activities for students.The VAVA currently contains audio for the following languages: Arabic (Tunisa), Chinese (Mainland and Taiwan), Hebrew, Norwegian, Polish.

This is a teacher-led activity within the field of linguistics, using child language acquisition as example. It can however be adapted to other disciplines. In this activity, students are given a two-part assignment whereby they shall analyse results on a given topic within child language acquisition, taken from different types of published research data. This activity is particularly useful for fields where data collection is diverse in nature. The activity aims at improving the student’s understanding of the field of research and how different types of data can complement each other. Also, it aims at furthering the student’s knowledge and skills regarding structuring and documentation of data.

This is a homework assignment I gave to linguistics students in the class Cross-Cultural Communication. It was designed as an introduction to language and new media, connecting principles of computer-mediated communication to formal linguistic concepts.

This assignment should be accessible to students in an Introduction to Linguistics class.