This course introduces students to the International Phonetic Alphabet, to the British transcription system, to the distribution of stress within a word, including simple  and complex words in addition to the distinctive function of stress in words of the same spelling (first semester). Sentence stress as well as aspects related to connected speech will be presented and practised in the second semester. These will be followed by intonation and comparision between British (RP) and American Accent (GA).


English Phonetics is a four semesters course for undergraduate students of English at the University of Biskra. In addition to defining the basic concepts in the field of Phonetics and explaining the anatomy and mechanisms of human speech, the course introduces students to the phonemic (i.e., vowels and consonants) as well as the prosodic aspects (i.e., stress, intonation, and rhythm) of English pronunciation. In this third term, the English Phonetics course focuses on word stress and its placement in different types of English words (i.e., simple words, complex words, compound words). 

This course introduces students to linguistics as a scientific study of human language. The course focus on major sub-fields of linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Language is a complex rule-governed mental system. We discuss how language is different from animal communication. Students learn to identify principles shared by all human languages and parameters along which languages differ.

This course introduces students to the International Phonetic Alphabet, to the British transcription system, to the distribution of stress within a word, including simple and complex words in addition to the distinctive function of stress in words of the same spelling (first semester). Sentence stress as well as aspects related to connected speech will be presented and practiced in the second semester. These will be followed by intonation and comparison between British (RP) and American Accent (GA).


Research is a method by which people in the academic and professional fields generate knowledge. It is an elaborate work that involves systematic observation, data collection  and analysis for the aim of gaining a deep understanding of a phenomenon. The objective of introducing this module is to acquire skills in the field of doing, writing and presenting a research work. The module also allows you to know concepts, approaches and tools of research and university work in general. Engaging with the different learning activities of this module helps you to develop your analytical skills, discovery methods,  investigative skills, critical thinking, logic and argumentation.