Aldina Marques

Podcasts in Higher Education: Students’ and Lecturers’ Perspectives

This paper reports the use of podcasts in blended-learning at the University of Minho, in Portugal. Six lecturers created their own podcasts with different purposes in order to support their undergraduate and graduate courses and their students’ (n=318) learning. The reported study belongs to a broader project about the impact of podcasts in blended-learning and it reports data from two semesters. Results give evidence of students’ acceptance regarding podcasts although they do not yet make use of the advantages of media and mobile technologies. The lecturers considered podcasts worthwhile for teaching and for students to learn, but they are time-consuming and there is no institutional recognition. In spite of this, they intend to continue using podcasts in their courses.

On the use of prosodic labelling in corpus-based linguistic studies of spontaneous speech

This paper addresses the construction of a spontaneous speech corpus in European Portuguese (hereafter EP), the corpus is presented and a prosodic labeling scheme that is here proposed is explained. The objective of this work is to provide a tool for linguistic analysis suitable to several research topics, which have speech and dialogue as objects. The main features considered in the database will be described and justified. Methodological problems and some observed prosodic and pragmatic related phenomena deriving from the labeling of the speech signal are also presented. a discussion is done about some applications on pragmatic studies, speech synthesis and prosodic phonology. Our purpose is to make this work available to scientific community, since there isn’t any other database of this kind informatically available for EP.