 Welcome to another suggestion for in-class activities this time dealing with vowels. The prerequisite for this in-class meeting is that our students have gone through the e-learning unit vowels and the two e-lectures, phonetics, basic segments of speech vowels one and vowels two prior to the in-class meeting. As usual, you should start with the definition of your central in-class goals. First of all, we will generally try to summarize and recapitulate the criteria to define the system of cardinal vowels. Then we will go straight into the first round of e-training. Together with our students, we will work out the various types of vowels and will exemplify them as well as possible using data from several languages. And finally, we will look at the vowels in present-day English seeking to define the positions of the monophones on the cardinal vowel chart. Before you start with the practical, as usual, you should dedicate about 25% or less of the in-class time for questions that the students might want to ask about the virtual session, the e-lectures or the workbook content. These questions, for example, could be triggered by you as a teacher. For example, you could ask the question, what is a rounded front vowel? And ask your students to produce one or several. U-U-Ö would be the result. Or you could ask the question, what is nasalization? And again, some students already know that, hopefully, that ë, like in French, linguistic, is a possible example of a nasalized vowel. Once this part has been finished, the phase of real practicing starts. Now, this is what I suggest to do first. First, I would try to recall the two central parameters of vowel classification and associate them with some vowels which students might want to classify along these lines. So, you should first of all perhaps ask the students for the central vertical parameter, and they would certainly come up with terms such as ëhighí and ëlowí. So, you have ëhighí and ëlowí vowels. And furthermore, you have vowels that can be classified according to the tongue position along the horizontal line in terms of ëfrontí and ëbackí. And now, you can interact with the students. Take an artificial vowel and move it around a little bit without using a symbol. So, this one, for example, asks the students what it is, and they would come up with an answer such as ëThis is a mid-high front vowelí, because immediately they would find out that here somewhere we have the mid-high position, and elsewhere we have the mid-low position. So, for example, if you move this vowel over here, they would say ëThis is a mid-low back vowelí. And what about this one? Well, here they would find out that we have forgotten one position, namely the central position, and we can define this as a mid-central vowel, and so on and so forth. Using this technique, you can easily show your students how you classify vowels, and donít use a symbol here. Now, the second task is just like the first. However, this time, we add the lip-rounding parameter and some of the secondary cardinal vowels to the task and explain to the students how to produce them, and we can do that together with our students. So, for example, you could ask your student what type of vowel is this one, and the first of all would come up, and now you explain, of course, to them that we use squares to indicate vowels that are produced with spread lips and circles for vowels that are produced with rounded lips. So, this would be a rounded high front vowel, and the symbol, of course, that we could use here is this one, and now, hopefully, your students are in a position to produce this vowel. They would come up with ù. Or what about this one? Now, here we have an unrounded high back vowel. The symbol that is used is this one, and the result is something which is very hard to produce for many speakers whose languages donít have this sort of vowel. And now, hereís the advice, produce a rounded one, which is easier, produce an ù, and then spread your lips. Keep the tongue where it is. ù, and there you are. Well, letís take a further example. Here is a vowel that can be produced in the low back region, so itís an unrounded low back vowel. The symbol would be something like this one, and the result is ù. So, depending on your time, you can do this exercise as long as you like. Just prepare these symbols in advance so that you can use as many of these circles as you want, and move them around on the board, if you have a wonderful device like this Promethean active board I have. Okay, now itís time for our first phase of ear training. To train the studentís auditory capability, I suggest 5 to 10 vowels in a consonantal environment with a sufficient amount of repetitions in each case should suffice. The students have to describe, have to transcribe, not describe, have to transcribe these consonant vowel structures. So, I will use something which starts with ù and then a vowel. They should transcribe this on a piece of paper, and eventually I will give the solution on the board. So, this is what I would do. I would first of all produce a combination such as ù, and do it several times ù. Now, once everyone is ready, I would continue with the next one ù. And again, now number 3 ù. And I could continue like this until I reached something like 10 vowels. And then I would give the solutions. So, we had ù and ù. And now you can ask your students whether they were right or wrong, and if they were right, they will love it. Believe it or not, students like these sort of exercises, especially if they are motivated in advance to achieve a good score. After a round of ear training, you could continue now with types of vowels. Now, one type has already been implicitly used, and that's of course the monofongs. And I always mention that an important part of the word monofongs is the fact that it contains two ù. So, here is a monofong, and now you could tell your students that already we can draw a distinction between two types. Between two types of monofongs, namely with long and short ones. And they should know that long monofongs receive the colon as an extra length mark. The next type of vowels is referred to as diphthongs. And again, two ù in the word diphthong are essential. Ask your students whether they know a diphthong, and in most cases they will come up with a diphthong ù, which is in fact a diphthong which can very well be used for the illustration of what diphthongs are. Now this is what you should do. You should first of all tell your students that diphthongs consist of two parts. Of the first part, the so-called onset. Here is the onset ù. In our case, a low central, unrounded vowel. And then diphthongs always have an offset. That is the second part. Don't argue with the students where it is. It's somewhere here. It is of course a mid-high to high front vowel, so this could be the symbol. And that is the offset. So we have an onset and we have an offset. And between these two types of articulatory postures, the tongue moves. And now this movement is generally referred to as a glide. Now depending on the direction of the glide, you can call it an up glide. So this would be an up glide here, from low to high, up, up glide. And the result would be ù. Or you can use it the other way around. And then you have, from high to low, a down glide. And if the glide is relatively short and only leads into the center of the vowel chart, you don't call it down glide or up glide. You normally call it in glide. And this is how you should illustrate the definition of diphthongs. Onset, offset, and glide. And the glide can be defined in terms of its direction and its final position. Up glide, down glide, in glide, front up glide, back up glide, and so on. The next type of vowel that has to be found in your list, now here's your list, should be the vowel that is nasalized. Nasalized vowels, and first of all I would introduce what it sounds like. So here we take a non-nasalized or oral vowel ù. And if we nasalize, we add this symbol, the so-called tilde, and it is ù. But what is nasalization? Well, I would tell the students to understand the following differences. Well, here is the clear-cut definition of nasalization in contrast to nasal. So we have two items that have to be explained here. On the one hand we have nasalization, and that applies to vowels. On the other we have nasal, the nasal manner of articulation that applies to consonants. Well, here are two examples. Let's use the blue color for nasalized vowels. Here is an example. And let's use green for nasal consonants such as this one ù. Both have in common that the velum must be open and that you have to produce a so-called velic opening. In both cases, the airstream uses the nose. So this is where the air goes in nasalized vowels. However, the interesting thing is it does not leave the nose. It only uses the nose as a resonance chamber, but it leaves the vocal tract via the mouth. So here is just a sort of resonance chamber for vowels. So nasalized vowels still use an airstream that leaves the vocal tract via the mouth. Nasal consonants, nasal consonants in contrast to nasalized vowels use an airstream that not only uses the nose, but passes through the nose and the airstream in the mouth is somewhere blocked in our case between the lips because we have amma, you could have anna and so on. So this is then the important thing. When all your students would need is some sort of illustration or exemplification, I suggest you use the VLC language index and exemplify nasalization on the basis of a language such as Polish. So here we have an oral vowel, nose, and here it's nasalized counterpart, again, that should suffice. The final vowel you want to list is a devoiced vowel or devoicing. Well, the example I suggest is always an example from Japanese. For example, you have vowels such as u and devoicing is indicated by a little circle underneath. And again, I suggest you use an example from the VLC campus to illustrate this. Well, here we are, a voiced vowel, and a voiceless counterpart, and here the same situation with two back vowels, unagi, and the voiceless counterpart, sukiyaki. You cannot really hear the sukiyaki, but it is there, but it is devoiced. By the way, you can all produce devoiced vowels, can't you? Just whisper, whisper along. There you are with devoiced vowels. The final exercise I suggest in this in-class meeting deals with present-day English. Let's say we want our students to find out the main monofongs in present-day English without any detailed phonological background knowledge. A good way to do this is the active plenary meeting in which two students come to the front. One is the writer. The only task this student has to do is write on the board, and the second student will collect the information coming from the audience. Their task is to find present-day English words with one vowel in it, define the vowel to the two students at the front, and tell the writer by means of a phonetic classification where to put it. So this is what they should do. For example, they could come up with a word such as red. And now hopefully someone would say, well, this is some sort of mid or mid-high front vowel. And then they would suggest that this epsilon could be a reasonable symbol. Or they come up with a word such as moon. And hopefully someone in the audience would point out that this is a high back vowel and that this could be a reasonable symbol, maybe even students. Some students would add that this is a vowel which can be considered to be longer than the previous one, air. And so on and so forth you could use words such as bat, where students would point out that this is a low front vowel. And you would tell them that this is really pretty low in present-day English and that the ash is the symbol that is normally used here. When ready, when all students have collected the monofongs of present-day English, that is the 12 monofongs, or even less, then the class instructor who normally sits back, sits in the back during the active plenary meeting, comes back to the front, optionally corrects and discusses the data collection by the audience. This is a very good exercise where you get the students involved in what you're doing. Well, the time required for all these exercises and tasks is up to you. According to my experience, students, once they have worked through the e-learning unit and the e-lectures, know so much prior to the in-class meeting that one can start straightforwardly. This gives you all the freedom to enrich the in-class phase with anecdotes about languages and their sound systems, or you could play the morphosyntactic part of a language from the VLC language index and have the students analyze the vowels in the data set. A very simple task, just give them the chart and they will be able to do it. Well, and if you want more exercises, just use the questions on the VLC practical sheet associated with the e-learning unit vowels. Enjoy your in-class meeting.