In the last year we have continued to review and develop our teaching practice and some interesting new developments include:

• The video-taping of lectures on one of our BSc course units (B203: Acoustics of Speech and Hearing). After taping the lecture we make the tapes available to our students as part of the audio-visual resources in our Listening Centre. The videos provide extra backup for students on the course and are a valuable resource for lecturers who wish to develop their lecturing skills. An initial worry that the availability of the videos would affect student attendance at lectures proved to be unfounded when written feedback from the students showed that lecture attendance was unchanged when compared to previous years.

• The continued expansion and updating of our Listening Centre facilities with the purchase of more published material and the production of material developed in-house. Our very successful tape "The Sounds of the IPA" now sells in large numbers to our own students and to students and teachers at other institutions. A pilot CD-ROM interactive training system (CD-MIKE), being developed by a member of our teaching staff, is also now being used by students.

• The introduction of learning objectives in one course on our BSc (B203: Acoustics of Speech and Hearing) was implemented initially to highlight the aims and objectives of our teaching in lectures and tutorials and, following encouraging feedback from our students, has now been extended to our laboratory classes.

• An unusual feature of the first-year syntax (LS103 Foundations of English Grammar) course is the English Grammar Guide (EGG) which the students are writing collectively. As well as producing one new entry, each student 'adopts' an entry produced by one of last year's students, with a view to improving it. Next year's students will do the same, but with the emphasis on reducing length - a useful exercise for them.

  One of the advantages of this activity is that the students know exactly who they are writing for - the next year's intake of novices. However, we still haven't found a good way to get the students to reflect on their editorial work on the adopted entries.

• As in previous years, our second-year course in Word Grammar (LS203: Word Grammar) was oriented primarily towards English, but for the first time a lot of students (14/23) chose to apply it in the final assessment to a language other than modern English (Old English, Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Punjabi, Spanish). This was very encouraging, suggesting that they felt confident about their ability to extend the general principles beyond English with little or no help from the lecturer. The reason may have been the switch to 'problem-based' teaching of English grammar, in which they used an 'encyclopedia' of Word Grammar to work out for themselves how to analyse sentences.

• In P10 (Advanced Ear Training) a Laryngograph-based PCLX system is taken to the classroom each week to allow integrated discussion of spectrograms and fundamental frequency contours within the dictation session. The lecturer routinely criticises his own performance by comparing what he thought he was doing with what the display shows he has done. The idea is to dispel fears and inhibitions about "errors" and get the students used to the very indirect mapping between what we perceive and what is objectively there.

• A Laryngograph-based loudness-pitch display was successfully used for intonation teaching this year by Professor Taniguchi with some Japanese students on the Summer Course for English Phonetics at UCL. He divided his students into two groups to look at the use of interactive intonation training displays - a control group taught without visual feedback and a test group who had access to the displays.

• In LP101 and LP102 (Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology - A&B) we have added to the very extensive course notes, exercises and assessments (which add up to a coursebook) by publishing a feedback sheet for each assessed piece of work, complete with explicit marking scheme, so that students can check their own grades. At the first session in each course, we specify the dates on which each piece of work will be returned with feedback. Work handed in is stamped with the date and we achieve a one-week turnaround.

• The Socrates Thematic Network in Phonetics and Speech Communication was set up in September 1996. The Network comprises eighty-four individual partners throughout Europe, as well as five of the major organisations in the field of Speech Communication Sciences. The main aim of the Network is to review the present status of education in the various disciplines that constitute Speech Communication Sciences, with a view to making recommendations on existing curricula, links between curricula and the need for new curricula. An important emphasis is also put on promoting the common use of speech material and demonstrations and the joint development of courses through the internet. Our Department is taking a central role in this network as Mark Huckvale is chairing the working group on Computer-Aided Learning and Use of the Internet and Valerie Hazan is co-chairing the working group on Phonetics. Both are part of the steering committee of the network.

• Important progress was made in the integration of the various postgraduate speech and hearing courses under our Centre for Speech and Hearing Sciences. Perhaps the most important instance of this was a new postgraduate module "Introduction to Speech and Hearing Science" taught to students from: the Department of Human Communication Science studying speech and language therapy; the Institute of Laryngology and Otology studying audiological science and medicine; and our own M.A. Phonetics and MSc Speech and Hearing Science students.