The Interdisciplinary Colloquium offers (young) scientists at the University of Koblenz the opportunity to present themselves and their research projects to a broad university public and to engage in conversation, get to know each other and exchange ideas. The scientific topics of the talks are presented in a comprehensible way and made accessible across disciplines in order to contribute to the scientific culture on campus.
One of the major goals of an English studies degree is for students to acquire and develop professional spoken language skills. This is especially relevant in an L2 context since a considerable number of university students in English studies aspire to become future English teachers. While there are numerous overviews of non-native speech and a significant amount of case studies on specific phonological features, few research projects have yet addressed the development of spoken English language skills by university students during their study programs from a bird's-eye perspective.
This research project will take some first steps towards closing this gap. We employ an apparent-time approach to investigate the spoken English competencies of university students at different stages of their Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English studies. Most of the students are L1 German and many of them stayed in an English-speaking country for at least three months. Data was collected via an online survey, which included 16 recordings per participant, eliciting specific phonological features of non-native speech. We further collected data on factors influencing foreign accents. The data processing was supported by AI: we used WhisperX and Python scripting for speech transcription and forced alignment for the automatic identification of speech sounds.
The first findings suggest an overall occurrence of final devoicing and quality shifts among the low vowels. The research project is ongoing and the talk will include a detailed discussion of the data preparation methods which can be reapplied for other studies.
The talk will also include a broader discussion of how AI can affect research and teaching at the University of Koblenz.
In cooperation with the CZS MINT-Forum.
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