What's Your Accent? Find Out Online

by Lisa Busiahn, Linguistics TA / Tutor

What do a forty-three year old man from South Africa, a twenty-four-year old woman from Azerbaijan, and a seventy-three-year old man from Boston, Massachusetts have in common?  They are all part of an ever-growing group of speakers from around the world whose voices have been recorded and posted on a website developed by linguistics professor Steven Weinberger. 

The Speech Accent Archive contains speech samples from speakers of over one hundred of the world’s languages, including English speakers from all over North America, Great Britain, and Australia.  Visitors to the site can listen to the samples and see International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions of each one. 

The site can be especially useful to teachers of English as a Second Language, actors, and those doing research in Phonology and Second Language Acquisition. 

And for the technologically savvy visitors who want to participate, there are even instructions detailing how to submit their own speech samples for inclusion in the archive. 

However, the speech accent archive is not just a valuable vehicle for research; many of its visitors simply enjoy listening to accents from all over the world without even leaving home.

Log on and listen at: http://accent.gmu.edu.

Project Chronicles Learning to Write Academic English

With grant support from University Life and IRB approval, a team of writing center researchers has  been interviewing non-native students from many different countries to find out their experiences with learning to write American academic English.

The research project will culminate in an audio-enhanced, interactive website that will serve as a resource for ESL students as well as teachers and tutors. Researchers include Eiman Hajabbasi, Lisa Busiahn, Anna Habib, undergraduate peer tutors Tonka Dobreva, Alex Antram (not pictured), and Terry Zawacki as principal investigator. 

GMU Writing Center Offered Personal Statement Workshops

This semester, the writing center offered Personal Statement Workshops for students in the process of applying for graduate schools and postgraduate scholarships and fellowships.  The workshops focused on strategies for tailoring personal statements towards their specific audiences. 

This often means finding ways for students to demonstrate how their goals dove-tail with those of the institution they are writing to while also writing in an individual, compelling voice.  Tutors worked with Deirdre Moloney, Coordinator for Postgraduate Fellowships and Scholarships, to develop the workshop.