PSLLT 2016 - Day 1

Live from lovely Calgary, here are some brief thoughts on the first day of the 8th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching conference:

- Great representation of non-English languages. Kyujin and I presented on Korean, and we saw presentations/posters on Chinese, German, and Russian (and that's not a comprehensive list).

- As would be expected given the conference theme, lots of interesting work being done incorporating tech. I'm particularly impressed with how corpus and NLP techniques are being utilized in pronunciation-focused projects.

- Ultrasound in pronunciation had 3 papers. Still strikes me as somewhat impractical, but the papers were presenting some really neat ideas and I'll b3 looking forward to seeing those lines of work develop.

- Is there a tension between pushes for individualized pronunciation instruction/training and greater classroom integration?

- It's been suggested that perception and pronunciation development sometimes requires some explicit instruction and drilling (i.e., HVPT). I wouldn't disagree that that approach can be effective. But does pronunciation instruction need to exclude non-phonological aspects of language learning? In other words, can we have a primary focus on pronunciation that might benefit language ability more holistically?

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