Professor Danielle Daidone is Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, currently a Fulbright US Scholar in Spain. Danielle visited Universidade de Lisboa under the Fulbright Inter-country Travel Grant Program and shares with us some activities and highlights of her visit:
«On April 7th, I attended a workshop at the Universidade de Lisboa Best Practices for Phonetic Training in Language Acquisition. In this workshop, I gave a keynote on using High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) as online homework for second language courses. HVPT is a technique in which listeners practice identifying words spoken in a variety of voices, which has consistently proven effective in improving listeners’ ability to differentiate and identify non-native sounds. Nevertheless, it is rarely integrated into language classes. I addressed students’ improvement in French, Spanish, and Japanese perception after doing HVPT (it helps with most sounds), students’ attitudes towards pronunciation instruction (they want more), and their impressions of HVPT as homework (it’s repetitive but very helpful). After my presentation, the colleague who invited me, Dr. Vita Kogan, asked about adding Russian to my recently developed HVPT website for teachers and students. We’re excited to create Russian listening activities and hopefully have these ready to go for next spring!
I also learned a lot from the other presenters. For example, one researcher found that having Chinese students put their hands on their throats while practicing the pronunciation Portuguese /b/ (with vocal cord vibration) and /p/ (without vocal cord vibration) helped them understand the difference more than just saying the sounds. I’m going to encourage the students in my Spanish phonetics courses to do this while they practice.
Besides the workshop, I had the opportunity to go on a walking tour of Lisbon and have dinners with colleagues. I enjoyed learning about life in Lisbon, as well as how academia works in Portugal. I now have a better understanding of the academic job market and the various grants that researchers can get in Portugal, including some for foreign researchers! I’m looking forward to coming back to Lisbon in June for the 35th Annual Conference of the European Second Language Association.»
Thank you, Danielle, we wish you the best!