Jo Verhoeven is Professor of Experimental Phonetics in the Department of Language and Communication Science at City. He specialises in Speech Production, Acoustic Phonetics, and the phonetic description of motor speech disorders. He has worked as a phonetician/linguist for over 35 years. Jo joined City, University of London in 2006 after working as a lecturer at Edinburgh University, Oxford University and Antwerp University (Belgium). He is a member of the International Phonetic Association.
Discovering Speech and Language
Most of my family are from a region in the Netherlands where the dialect variation is very rich, and the tone of speech sounded as music to my ears during my childhood. That triggered my interest in language and speech. At university, I learnt about the astonishing number of languages in the world (about 7,000) I have always been truly fascinated by the fact that all these languages -no matter how diverse they are- serve the same purpose: they enable people to share their thoughts and feelings with others.
Academia
I started studying languages at the University of Antwerp, where I graduated with a BA in Dutch and English. Then I went on to do an MA in Linguistics at Antwerp University and an MSc/PhD in Phonetics at Edinburgh University. In between I completed an MPhil in Neurolinguistics at the University of Brussels.
I am involved in different modules in the Linguistics Programme: I mainly teach on various aspects of phonetics, but I also have a fundamental interest in spelling systems in languages. It is interesting to see how spelling has developed as an analogue of speech, and how speech and spelling often go hand in hand and influence each other.
Lecturing at City
My teaching style is highly interactive. I like it when students ask questions, interrupt, and disagree with particular points of view. Disagreement stimulates discussion and that provides new insights. I also like to make my classes practical so that students can explore their own speech themselves by using specialist software and a wide variety of instrumental techniques to visualise pronunciation. Students also learn to tune their ears to identify how speech sounds are pronounced in languages of the world. This learning is supported by online multimedia techniques.
The student experience
The Linguistics degree at City, University of London does not only provide a profound understanding of the communicative ability of Humankind, but it also enables you to develop a wide range of transferrable skills such as information processing, creativity, attention to detail, project management and teamwork. These will support your professional development.
It cannot be denied that London is a very exciting location and as a student, you need to develop not only academically but also in many other ways: London offers so many opportunities to do this. There are also many languages spoken here, and the cultural richness behind all these languages is absolutely fantastic. This makes City University a perfect place for students to study linguistics!
