Prosodic features of language learners' fluency

Satellite Workshop of "Speech Prosody", Leiden (The Netherlands), 1 July, 2024

The aim of this event is to bring together colleagues from two research communities to focus on speech fluency: spoken second/foreign language (L2) on the one hand and speech prosody on the other.

In the past, fluency was often ignored in speech prosody research (as reflected in the Handbook of Language Prosody (2022) and also in the Speech Prosody conferences). Moreover, fluency and timing are only rarely treated together with intonation-related aspects in L2 research. However, a broader ranging view on L2 sentence prosody would be beneficial to the construction of theories concerning the acquisition of L2 prosody and applications such as assessments in teaching, exercises for individual learning, assessments and automatic testing of spoken performances. Likewise, research of language learning does not seem to be very much integrated into speech prosody research. This concerns both theoretical and methodological aspects but also acquisition and annotation of learner data, e.g. in learner corpora.

Thus, the scope of the workshop includes:

• measuring fluency,
• assessment of fluency by human experts, non-experts, and machines,
• learner corpora and annotation of disfluencies,
• elements and combinations of disfluencies (e.g. filler particles, disfluent pauses, lengthenings, repetitions, repairs),
• varying degrees of fluency in different speech styles and tasks,
• fluency and L2 proficiency levels,
• intonational aspects of fluency,
• visual aspects of fluency (e.g. hand-arm gestures, eye-gazing, torso movement),
• teaching methods for fluency improvement in L2 speech production and perception.

Interested colleagues were invited to submit a two-page abstract (first page for text, second page for illustrations, tables, and references) to be reviewed by an expert committee. Only oral presentations are planned. In addition to this workshop, we are discussing the possibility of editing a special (open) issue in a recognised journal (e.g. "Journal of Second Language Pronunciation" or "Studies in Second Language Acquisition") to which we would encourage presenters of workshop papers to contribute.

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Workshop organisers
Jürgen Trouvain (Saarland University)
Bernd Möbius (Saarland University)
Nivja de Jong (Leiden University)

Keynote speakers
Lieke van Maastricht (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Malte Belz (Humboldt University Berlin)

Contact: Please direct all inquiries to l2fluency@lst.uni-saarland.de

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