My six months in Germany ended up, indeed, facilitating the collaboration with Prof. I appreciated the opportunity to discuss various research-related and other matters with her in our weekly meetings. Working in adjacent offices also allowed us to deepen and extend our existing collaboration, notably on a study addressing the speaking style and task mode effects on L2 speech fluency. I am also grateful to Prof.
Her visit greatly facilitated the progress of our collaborative work on the links between fluency and gesture, which is based on the interactional data collected in the FDF2 project. Our pilot study has been published as part of the DiSS workshop proceedings. My research stay in Marburg, therefore, not only facilitated the collaboration with German colleagues, but also brought me closer to my other central European colleagues, including Dr. I familiarized myself with the research done in the department by participating in their Linguistics colloquium research meetings and got to present our FDF2 project to the group.
During lunches and other casual meetings, I learned that one of my colleagues, Aoife Holmes-Rein, hosts a podcast called Grandiose Grammar , including 45 episodes and counting! In the first 3LC meeting, the topic was language change and lexical innovation. While my visit was focused on research, I was happy to get the chance to give some guest lectures as well.
I talked about social approaches to language learning on a course focusing on linguistic theory and the history of linguistic ideas. In addition, I gave fluency-themed talks on two different courses: one focused on spoken English and another focused on English as a foreign language. The participants on the latter course were future teachers of English, so we focused especially on the teaching of speech fluency.
Getting to reflect on these topics with various groups of students gave a lot of food for thought also for my own research. I am grateful to all students in Marburg who attended these classes and to Prof. A lot of my spare time during the visit was spent exploring my hometown, Marburg, as well as the cities nearby.
