Leonidas Silva Jr. | Luciani Tenani
Abstract
This study addresses the challenge of teaching theoretical prosody concepts (i.e., studies about stress,
rhythm, intonation, voice quality, and other suprasegmental aspects of human pattern of pronunciation)
in undergraduate courses. Our main aim was to develop a didactic approach to promote active and
reflective learning about prosody and its suprasegmental characteristics. We hypothesize that creating an
academic podcast can serve as an effective scholarly research tool for community development and
fostering an inclusive educational environment in phonetics and phonology. For Methodology, a set of
didactic activities was designed to guide students in recording podcast episodes. The theoretical
framework employed was the Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) methodological
approach. A total of 58 undergraduate students from Phonetics and Phonology courses at the State
University of Paraíba (UEPB) and São Paulo State University (UNESP) were grouped. Nine student
groups performed seven weeks of academic exchange activities. They collaboratively addressed topics on
the phonetic- phonological characteristics of Brazilian Portuguese regional varieties (Paraíba and São
Paulo inland) and their potential effects on foreign language production/perception. Insights were
summarized into a script, and two students from each cross-university group recorded an episode, which
was subsequently edited and published. Acoustic processing was based on the podcast samples produced
by the students from both Paraíba and São Paulo. It involved forced-alignment via Munich Automatic
Segmentation (MAUS), manual correction, re-alignment into prosodic-level units, and automatic feature
extraction using a Praat script. Statistical analysis was carried out through Mann- Whitney U test to
compare the independent effect of each dialectical group on the prosodic-acoustic features. Results
revealed that features of speech, such as pause duration, f0 centrality, variability and dynamics, as well as
long-term spectral intensity showed significant differences between these dialects. This academic
podcasting experience enabled us to teach the relevance of studying prosody, and this was positively
evaluated by the participating students. The project also enabled students to identify with their own
linguistic diversity, including regional accents expressed through prosodic features, by hearing their own
and others’ voices. The findings support that the academic podcast project can be successfully
implemented as a scholarly research tool.
Keywords: Prosody. Academic podcasting. Acoustic phonetics. Brazilian regional dialects. Virtual exchange.
