Lorenzo Garcia-Amaya, Romance Languages and Literatures | 2020-2021
Second-language learning is frequently associated with terms such as “challenging”, “difficult” and “overwhelming”. This is due in part to the fact that the language-learning process is seen through the lens of rather different academic areas, such as literature or mathematics. In my upper-level Spanish courses, I intend to change this rhetoric by involving my students in authentic research situations.
Through this proposal, I will create a series of video tutorials for Praat, a speech-analysis software program used in Spanish 418 “Second Language Acquisition”. Although students are typically eager to conduct research in my course, they are not familiar with the use of specialized software such as Praat. The Praat tutorials that I intend to develop will provide students with the opportunity to complement their education with bimodal, asynchronous instruction on how to conduct research. Class time will therefore be used to discuss concrete research papers that explore different issues of second language acquisition, and to make connections between the data that students analyze and the theories of language acquisition covered in the course.