Phonology assignment

I don't often blog about my school life, which is hardly surprising. It's bad enough to be slogging over readings and assignments all the time and I don't really need to spend my blogging time on them as well. But desperate situations call for desperate measures and I desperately need to whine about a phonology assignment I've been working on.

Today was spent entirely on preparing for the presentation on Thursday. It's a very short article, only 4-5 pages, but the problem is that the researcher, Helen Fraser, tries to address many complex issues in such limited space. This would of course mean that there was insufficient elaboration. For someone like me who has no background knowledge whatsoever on the topic (cognitive/communicative approach to ESL pronunciation teaching), it's really torturous. I ended up having to read some of Fraser's other articles. One was an epic work of at least 100 pages (which is about thrice the length of our usual readings). I didn't know how to react when my lecturer passed it to me and said, "this will be helpful" (although the first thing I did was to check the number of pages). The researcher had also published a CD-ROM on the topic, so I was really ploughing my way through her stuff. Just call me a Fraser expert now!