CANCELLED (03-04-2018) Provisional title: Investigating oral presentations in the European Portuguese L1 classroom
Submitted by:
Ana Isabel Mata
Abstract:
Investigating oral presentations in the European Portuguese L1 classroom
ABSTRACT
The development of spoken language skills (including both oral expression and oral comprehension skills) is nowadays recognized as important / mandatory in L1. However, this is still one of the most overlooked areas of language learning and instruction in Portugal, as language assessment continues literacy-centered. Former trainee teachers’ perceptions about oracy instruction and assessment in European Portuguese as L1 indicate that: (i) they are far from satisfied with the level of development of adolescent students in oracy; (ii) students' difficulties and low motivation for speech production tasks is one of the main factors that hinder the training of oracy in their classes (Mata & Rovira, 2017). Research comparing adolescents and adults in a classroom context (e.g. Mata et al., 2014; Mata & Moniz, 2016), shows how speakers adapt to speaking styles required at school (e.g. Mata, 2017) and suggests that the development of spoken language skills should be more highly valued by teachers in Basic and Secondary Education.
This study focuses on oral presentations. These are one of the main classroom tasks to train students' prepared speech production and to develop students' communicative fluency. The study uses a subset of CPE-FACES, a corpus of European Portuguese spoken by teenagers and adults in school context (16h). This subset comprises 9 spontaneous presentations and 9 prepared unscripted presentations, from 6 students (14-15 year olds, 9th grade, balanced by gender) and 3 teachers (2 women and 1 man), all speakers of standard European Portuguese (Lisbon region). Based on the analysis of this subset (comprising word-by-word time aligned orthographic transcripts, enriched with the annotation of disfluencies and prosodic patterns), the presentation will summarize the key findings on speaking style variation at school, giving an overview of student adaptation strategies to oral presentation tasks, in terms of prosodic variation strategies, disfluencies and communicative fluency. In future research work, we intend to explore the effects of such strategies on teachers’ perceptions and their assessment of students' oral expression skills.
REFERENCES
Mata, Ana Isabel (2017). Teaching oracy to adolescent students in L1: trainee teachers’ approaches. ARLE 2017. Tallin, 15-17 June.
Mata, Ana Isabel & José María Rovira (2017). Oracy in teacher education: perspectives from L1 and L2. Bringing together research and practice: Language teaching, language learning and teacher training in Portuguese and Spanish, Lisbon, 2-3 November.
Mata, A. I. & H. Moniz (2016). Prosódia, variação e processamento automático. In A. M. Martins & E. Carrilho (eds.), Manual de Linguística Portuguesa. MRL Series, Mouton de Gruyter: 116-155.
Mata, A. I., H. Moniz, F. Batista, J. Hirschberg (2014). Teenage and adult speech in school context: building and processing a corpus of European Portuguese. Proceedings 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation - LREC 2014, European Language Resources Association (ELRA): 3914-3919.