The CIRCE project in collaboration with DFCLAM University of Siena, H2IOSC project and CNR-ILC are organizing an online seminar "Learning to listen: Coping with spoken variation in the workplace", on Monday 28 April 2025, 16:30CET.
The seminar is free of charge, but participants must register. To access this and next events, you should create an account on the H2IOSC Training Environment. Once logged in with your credentials, choose the course “Language and Accent Discrimination - Online Seminar Series” and activate it with the code PbK837GtE.
Summary:
The university workplace is representative of international-ised/-ising workplaces in general, where different communities, languages, and cultures coexist. Staff encounter their colleagues’ and students’ accents – of Italian, of English, and in my case, French - and sometimes the result is that communication can be quite hard work. Even with the best intentions, sometimes we just cannot understand a speaker. However, when we think about spoken interactions, we have to accept that it is not just about how the speaker produces a language; the actions and skills of listeners should also be addressed. This flip or change of perspective begs two questions: can we, as listeners, learn to cope better with spoken variation? And if so, how?
In this talk I’ll summarize speech research findings about how listeners can improve their ability to adapt to new speakers and new accents. I’ll look at listener accommodation and accentism, as well as the conceptual trio of accentedness, comprehensibility and intelligibility. I’ll describe concrete ways to prepare listeners to cope with accented speech, with a primary focus on listeners instead of speakers. Examples will come mainly from my work with non-academic staff at a large, French public university; my 1-hour format for listener training can be reused in other professional contexts. If possible, I’ll also describe the next steps in this work, as I prepare to continue training previous workshop participants as part of a longitudinal study.
