Dr. Vivianne Ruellot, associate professor of French at Western Michigan University, will present “See What You Say: Learning Pronunciation Using Computer-Mediated Visual Feedback” on Wednesday, March 13, at 4 p.m. at Hope College in the Fried-Hemenway Auditorium of the Martha Miller Center for Global Communication.
The presentation is sponsored by the college’s French-Cultural Studies Colloquium. The public is invited, and admission is free.
Ruellot’s presentation, based on her current research, will provide a review of previous studies associated to the relative difficulty of second language pronunciation learning, to computer-assisted pronunciation instruction and to the multi-modal (ie, audio and visual) presentation of information. She will present the format that she typically uses in her studies, and report on the results of an experiment that she conducted focusing on the learning of the sounds /u/ and /y/ with speech analysis programs that generate visual representations of the acoustic characteristics of sounds.
Ruellot teaches French, French linguistics and applied linguistics at Western Michigan University, and also serves as coordinator of beginning-French courses and as liaison between Western Michigan University and Kalamazoo high schools. Her research interests include second language acquisition and pedagogy, pronunciation instruction and computer-assisted French pronunciation instruction. She received her doctorate in French and second language acquisition from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The Martha Miller Center for Global Communication is located at 257 Columbia Ave., at the corner of Columbia Avenue and 10th Street.