Princeton at NEALLT

Building a video corpus and developing authentic oral input activities to support language learners

This year’s conference for the Northeast Association for Language Learning Technology (NEALLT) was held at UPenn in Philadelphia and Princeton Spanish & Portuguese Lecturers Catalina Méndez Vallejo, Adriana Merino, Anais Holgado Lage, Andie Faber, and Jovana Zujevic were in attendance along with Ben Johnston, senior educational technologist with the McGraw Center. Catalina and Ben presented their work on a new video corpus Voces de Princeton, which features Spanish-language interviews and conversations on a variety of topics and with diverse subjects from the Princeton campus community. The videos are categorized by thematic and grammatical content. This corpus will soon be available to the public, providing authentic audiovisual material that Spanish language instructors can use in their courses and speech samples that linguists can study for their research. Adriana, Anais, Ben, and Andie presented work they have done on the online language-learning platform Aprendo to create activities for students using interviews, videos, and podcasts to provide students with authentic oral input. The platforms allows the team to create activities that guide students through the listening activities. First, students answer questions, review vocabulary, and investigate themes that will support their understanding. Students then listen to the recording or watch the video and answer comprehension questions that pull out the key ideas. Finally, they engage in reflection, answering questions about their opinions or asking them to relate the content of the listening activity to other topics from class or in broader society.