Amanda Huensch (University of Pittsburgh) 

Romy Ghanem (Northern Arizona University) 

Shelley Staples (University of Arizona)

How to build and contribute to spoken corpora for L2 pronunciation research

The presenters will offer a practice-based workshop demonstrating the strengths of two digital corpus tools, CLAN and ELAN, in the steps of data preparation, coding, and analysis of spoken corpora. The analysis of spoken language is a time-consuming and laborious process. One advantage of using corpora or corpus-based techniques to investigate oral language is that they allow for some automated analysis of data. Researchers may be reluctant to build and annotate corpora because of the time necessary for these features and/or a lack of training. Digital corpus tools such as CLAN and ELAN afford partial automatization of these processes.  These programs can be combined with others such as Praat. Using a 30-second dialogic L2 English speech file from the Corpus of Collaborative Oral Tasks (CCOT, Crawford & McDonough, 2014), workshop attendees will be guided through a step-by-step procedure to extract prosodic and fluency features.

Rachel Hayes-Harb (University of Utah)

Shannon Barrios (University of Utah)

Investigating the phonological structure of the L2 lexicon: Designing and conducting experiments

This workshop is designed to orient researchers of all experience levels to experimental approaches to exploring the phonological structure of the second language (L2) lexicon, including lexical decision and artificial lexicon experiments. Topics covered will include: (1) research questions that can be addressed by such experiments; (2) experimental design; (3) materials development; (4) participant considerations; (5) data analysis and interpretation resources; and (6) exploring the implications of findings for second language pronunciation learning and teaching. Workshop participants will be encouraged to develop a preliminary research question and prepare a pilot study design and plan.