When I was teaching introductory linguistics, I had a problem with the phonetic transcription exercises in the textbooks I was using: they asked students to transcribe “the pronunciation” of individual words – implying that there is a single correct pronunciation with a single correct transcription.

When I first studied phonetic transcription I learned about broad and narrow transcription, where narrow transcription contains much more detail, like the presence of aspiration on consonants and fine distinctions of tongue height. Of course it makes sense that you wouldn’t always want to go into such detail, but at the time I didn’t think about what detail was excluded from broad transcription and why.

When I first taught phonetic transcription, almost seven years ago, I taught it almost the same way I had learned it twenty-five years ago. Today, the way I teach it is radically different. The story of the change is actually two stories intertwined. One is a story of how I’ve adopted my teaching to the radical changes in technology that occurred in the previous eighteen years.