Teaching

The pronunciation/phonetics classes that Prof. Wilson teaches at the University of Aizu benefit from taking place in high-tech classrooms that are well equipped with audio/video/computer equipment (see image). He often brings along an ultrasound machine and displays real-time images of the tongue to the class. He also teaches students how to use Praat, an open-source acoustic analysis program, to analyze their own pronunciation. In addition to teaching phonetics and pronunciation to groups of up to 48 students, Prof. Wilson teaches Intermediate English 2 (a sophomore EFL class) and Thesis Writing and Presentation (a 4th year class). He also teaches a graduate class called Speech Articulation and Acoustics. Schoology or Moodle, open-source course management systems, are used in all of his classes. Prof. Wilson's YouTube channel has videos about how to use Praat software, example ultrasound tongue videos, as well as Japanese TV news reports on his lab's research.

From January to March 2009, Prof. Wilson was a regular on an NHK weekly television series called 3-Month Topic English Conversation. Other regulars included University of Tokyo Professor Yoshifumi Saito and actresses Harumi Nemoto and Rachel Smith. Due to popular demand, the program was re-run from January to March 2010.

In the summer of 2009, Prof. Wilson co-taught an articulatory phonetics course at the University of California (Berkeley) as part of the 2009 Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).