So welcome. Welcome.
Good afternoon.
Welcome to the last this last round of
parallel sessions
of the of this conference to this afternoon.
We are going to have we're going to have to to talks.
Professor Raquel moreno is going to begin with
with sorry for
what let me find I'm
in the wrong e yet you go there you go
with a with a talk entitled
elaborate and of nonconventional aids
in a speech phonetic classes.
I want to start by introducing the speaker this afternoon.
Michael Sam Moreno is a professor at the faculty.
His Majesty a of the University of Valencia.
She's a member of the Yale Research Group on language teaching.
She currently teaches the subjects learning and teaching French language
and innovation and introduction to research and education
at the Master's Degree in secondary education of this university.
For more than ten years, Harris's
has focused on audio description as a modality for active
access, accessibility and inter semiotic translation.
Currently, she's studying audio description
a study the tool in foreign language classes and its role
in the development of linguistic and cultural competence systems.
Exploring the use of
behavior in the classroom not only as a valuable pedagogical tool
that is an obvious source of information and motivation for
students, but also as an instrument for self expression
and teaching for future teachers of French as a foreign language.
So thank you very much for your presentation and you can begin.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, everyone.
I would like to thank firstly the organizing committee
for allowing me to present these communication.
I, I am going to present a pilot project
which was carried out at Universidad de Valencia,
which consisted of elaborate in non-conventional judo
inscriptions in Spanish phonetics classes.
So I guess it's. Yes.
So as we all.
Sorry as we all know or your description
is a form of inter semiotic translation
in which the elements that make up the audiovisual art
product are explained or have to be explained
so that blind or low vision people can understand
and specially to me enjoy the audiovisual product.
And according to I know these must be made to
try to get a similar
view as
those people who can see normally.
So in fact all the description is a written text,
a script that must be aurally interwoven in
in the the original soundtrack of the film.
The audio described right.
A text usually reads it and feed it between the dialogs.
So as so little Pardo states, or the description is an activity
that lends itself to practice aural aspects
of the language and
production sorry, such as pronunciation, intonation and speed,
which was something we intended to explore in this project.
So what?
What happens? CNS
Does you go.
Thank you so.
Yes. So as I said,
the description must be delivered and according to the Spanish norms,
the norm, let's say,
is that the locution must be neutral
and diction must be correct.
Whatever that means and the tone must be appropriate.
So the norm establishes that.
If we have, for example,
children's cinema to be or to described, the tone
and the intonation must be more expressive.
But the norm doesn't say how to get a more expressive intonation.
Or what do we have to understand
by a more expressive intonation?
On the other hand, Friar and ITC guidance
standards on the description in UK
say that usually a neutral delivery
is the norm and asked for the American guidelines.
Or Joyce neither.
For example, he says that voices delivery should be consonant
with the nature of the material being described.
So according to Cubby Farkas, it is we can distinguish
three different ways to deliver audio description.
So we have Spanish style.
The Spanish audio descriptions tend to be neutral,
more uniform, a flatter.
On the other hand, we have the UK
audio descriptions which usually adopt the
the audio description and the tone to the film genre.
And finally, we have the American audio descriptions,
which are more expressive, more emphatic.
So even if
the norms all the norms state that a neutral tone must be the norm,
the audio describe must find the balance
between a neutral or an unobtrusive voice.
And on the other hand, try to adapt
the audio description tone to film, genre
and I reproduce here an example of ITC, which is quite
interesting, I think when it says in a three
in a tense thriller or drama, the delivery should be steady
and where the background music is menacing,
the voice should reflect the tension.
But without becoming melodramatic
And in comedy, the navigation should also be steady.
But in this case it must be delivered with a slight smile in the voice.
So it's very beautiful how it's said, but it's a bit difficult
to assess how an audio describes or is describing comedy with a slight
smile in the voice.
Anyway,
I have to point out finally, that
I guess that I think that a
non-conventional do descriptions
should be studied independent
because well, following for example,
the reception studies of all the unfolds in 2009
and also between films into 2010,
they conducted several studies on reception
of audio description in the film, in the field of theater,
and they focus on enjoyment of the play
of the play by blind spectators.
But to achieve this goal, they had to move away from the
traditional due description.
So the conventional audio descriptions, particularly in terms
of how to describe and the results were encouraging.
In general, the the end users preferred the non-conventional audio
descriptions rather than the conventional ones
because they got an immersion feeling
that was not, as
I would say, evident with traditional descriptions.
On the other hand,
as we all may know, to
prosody and supra segmental elements
are not traditionally taught
in a foreign language classes,
and in general it doesn't receive the attention we consider it deserves.
As this story says, and that could be explained
because the communicative approach that we usually adopt in
foreign language classes usually place
the emphasis in other aspects and often
pronunciation freedom fluency are ignored.
And this story said that that may occur because of
a lack of materials and or lack
a lack of training of teachers that sometimes doesn't
doesn't work on phonetics.
But again, according to Ramos, Oliveira, supra, segmental
elements of language constitute the personality of language,
and they have to be expressly
taught as either all and or said, because
it's not a phenomenon of automatic acquisition. When
a student learns a foreign
language, he tends to imitate the structural
intonation of its own language and not of the other.
And in the same vein, supra, mental elements
that do not only convey linguistic information,
but also para linguistic information such as information
about the speaker's attitude or the emotional state of the speaker,
which was something that we wanted to explore in this project again.
So as even if intonation
is still pending issue,
we consider that it is not it is not possible
to achieve good communicative competence
without sufficient commands of supra segmental elements.
So this project,
this pilot project, was carried out in a course of phonetics and phonology
at Universidad de Valencia with five
American students.
The course lasts 16 weeks and they
they come to class 4 hours of phonetics per week.
So it's it's a big amount of phonetic classes.
We followed a task based learning
approach and we design theoretical and practical classes
on phonetics, specially practical classes.
So for this project, we our starting point was an online questionnaire
which had two main goals.
The first one was to determine the profile of the learners we have.
And on the second hand, we wanted to find out their previous
previous experience on audio description
or audiovisual translation in foreign language classes.
And then we conducted two diagnostic tests, a one
oral test and one written texts.
As for the oral test,
they had to read aloud a text, very short text, which was recorded,
and we asked five simple questions at the end
in order to check if they they had understood the text.
They just read.
And then there was a very short interview about their life
at university.
So we wanted to combine reading and text
and then to get some spontaneous speech.
Then in the second phase, as we
we knew that
our students were unfamiliar with the description.
We prepared two sessions on a theoretical
and practical approach to Spanish audio description.
So we presented the norms of audio description,
but also they watched some scenes with and without audio description,
with and without images in order also to
to reflect
on the needs and expectations
on the the end users of audio description.
The third phase was was the longest one.
We developed some phonetics
activities and in this phase at the end of this third phase,
they created non-conventional audio descriptions.
So in order to create these ordered
all these non-conventional descriptions,
we selected five different scenes from five jars.
So we had drama, action,
comedy, horror and children's.
The scenes didn't last more than 2 minutes
and they had to order describe that the scene
and render the oral text and the written texts too,
because we wanted to check both texts.
And then in the fourth phase,
we conducted two oral to two tests.
So an oral test and a written test.
As for the evaluation of intonation,
that is the most difficult part
of this project.
Well, first, no, I'm going to talk about the activities we followed.
He Fernandes and we started by the
simple activities
which consisted of ear training or perception training.
So we wanted the students to get used to
the intentional structures of Spanish.
In a second phase, they had to imitate these structures
and the final phase they had to produce texts.
So not only non-conventional
descriptions, but also speeches about different, different subjects.
And as I was saying,
the main difficulty in this project
was to assess intonation.
So as I said, how can we know that
the student is describing with a slight smile in his voice or
the tension, etc.?
So we followed.
Clearly that distinguish distinguishes
five different type of pauses in speech
and the meaning of these poses
that we tried
to investigate in in the productions of the students.
So we have the usual posed or absolute final pose
where there's a full stop at the end, a significant pause
where the presence of these spots changes the meaning of the utterance.
So it's not the same to say, no, I call me the bloke
not they call me the podium
and an imperative pose the explanatory post
when it's when we introduce an explanation.
And finally the potential pause, which was the process
we wanted the students to produce in the
the non-conventional audio descriptions.
It's not unnecessary, but it's
it's made when the speaker wants
to put some meaning, let's say in the in the other description.
In this case, we also distinguished, inadequate pauses.
We've understood this poses as
the inadequate separation of phonic groups,
for example, agitations and also repetitions.
The separation of phonic groups
consisted when you have a
a meaningful, I mean, meaningful and utterance
with a meaning and use plated, these hinder
not only rhythm, not only fluency, but especially comprehension.
So we tried also to tackle it say these inadequate pauses.
And finally we wanted to check the comprehension of the text
because as you are going to see,
it's not obvious that when they read the text,
they were understanding what they were reading.
So. Well, we have
yes, well, that's the students profile.
So there were five students between 15 and 43 years old.
They've studied between two and six years of Spanish
and all of them wanted to improve their oral skills.
Uh, reception as well as production.
So we thought that this project might fit well with them.
And only one student
said that she knew what order description was.
She gave a good definition of the description, but
the rest did not venture to to do so.
So for the analysis of the first test,
the first text had
nine absolute final poses.
One an emotive pause and a significant pause.
And the students, as you may see,
they managed to do the absolute final poses
quite correctly because they don't have apparently
difficulties in identifying declarative sentences.
But the problem was with significant pauses and accumulative pauses
because no one did these poses.
The main difficulty in this first test
was the inadequate pauses, because there were a lot of
phonic groups that were incorrectly separated
and a lot of hesitations, and these hindered not only rhythm
and fluency, but particularly comprehension,
and that if you see the, uh,
correctly answer questions to students were incapable
of answering any question and
another student just answered correctly one question.
And when we asked them, they said that
they couldn't do two task at the same time.
So they were focused on pronunciation
and they didn't understand a word of what they were reading.
So they needed a second or a third reading in order
to answer correctly and to understand the text.
In the final test, the results were much better.
The final text had nine absolute final poses
to exclamation, so two potential pauses,
one significant pause, and one explanatory pause.
In this case, as I said, the results were better.
I'm sorry.
Everyone made the explanatory pause
and the final pauses have also been well interpreted.
The most
striking result in this case is that they managed to answer correctly
four of the
five questions in most of the case, or that reached the average.
So they understood the text and they read it aloud
quite correctly, so that there is in fact a progress
as to the non-conventional audio descriptions, the let's say, problem
is that I think I have to and we have to analyze
the progress of each student with each production line.
And it's very difficult to have another view.
I mean, overall results because each student
has its own style or the describing.
But anyway, there are some general trends that I have
repeated use here.
For example, as for the other description of the drama scene,
ah, it was the productions were flat.
There were no significant changes in intonation.
It's true that this scene didn't have a dramatic load, so
maybe the students were not as aware of
changing intonation in this scene.
And there were
a few inadequate pauses, probably because they rehearsed at home.
And so there was yes,
there was no
significant inadequate pauses.
As for the action scene
and the comedy scene, there's a common characteristic,
I would say, is that they use a telegraphic style
so that they used short sentences, symbols, sentences.
Sometimes we find sentences with just one verb or one word
in the action scene, which was
which was the one from Mission Impossible with Tom
Cruise falling down, etc..
So there was action, but there was also kind of suspense.
So the where to potential pauses that were made by all students
and in this case the pauses were very short.
The comedy scene had the higher pitch of all the productions.
It was a scene from Mr.
Bean, so the sentences were very short and the rhythm was very, very fast.
As for the or scene, we observed a particularly longer pauses
because of the music and of the sound.
So the the students respected
these music and didn't talk all the time.
So the pauses were longer and they use also short sentences
and potential pauses were
present in this audio description,
conveying the suspense of the scene.
And finally, the children's scene is the most different
from all the the other genres.
It's the highest speeds.
Graphically, the students introduce numerous exclamatory sentences.
The pace is very fast, and we observe change of the tone,
which is the most significant of all the productions.
So as I say that these are just an overview,
but we have to keep analyzing all the productions.
To conclude, I would say that yes, there are limitations in this study.
It's a pilot study with just five students, and it's true that
teaching intonation and assessing intonation, it's quite a complex task.
But we've observed progress, which is quite evident in the
initial test and the final test
as well on the non-conventional audio descriptions.
And it's true that to start with,
I think that our focus in a more evident
genres like comedy and children's, which introduces
changes in intonation, whether them, for example,
drama or actions where the changes were not as significant.
And thank you. This is the biography.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for your interesting presentation.
If you don't mind, I forgot to tell at the beginning.
Do you mind if we leave the questions up to the presentation,
if that's okay with you?