Team member, Oihane Muxika-Loitzate, tells us about her experience at SLRF:
Besides the poster, I also had the opportunity to present my project on “The production of voiceless stops in cognates and non-cognates among heritage speakers of Spanish”.
Tahiira, Megan and I attended the plenary talk of Dr. Luke Plonsky on Friday afternoon. The title of his talk was “Mind your measures: Methodological reform at the SLA-assessment interface”. In his talk, Dr. Plonsky explained that the results that we obtain in our L2 research depend on the types of measurements that we use. For that reason, it is essential to reconsider those measurements and to think of their validity in our studies.
There were also other poster presentations, paper presentations, and colloquia at SLRF. One of the colloquia that I attended was the Colloquium VII: “Shifting boundaries in second language speech research”, which took place on Saturday afternoon. In this colloquium, Charles Nagle, Amanda Huensch, Pavel Trofimovich, Mary Grantham O’Brien, and Okim Kang presented their studies on second language speech. I was able to learn more about ways in which we can measure intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness, and the different factors that affect informants’ ratings and their bias in these ratings. Moreover, at the end of the presentations we had time for a short discussion with other researchers in the room. During this time I worked with Okim Kang and a group of attendees and we talked about exposing learners to high variability in the input, and more specifically, about exposing learners to world Englishes in the classroom.