Portuguese Program Research Assistants Keyla Carvalho & Augusta Saraiva Win 1st Place in Undergraduate Research Expo
June 1, 2018
Their poster presentation "Negotiation of Meaning in Portuguese According to Linguistic
Background" won 1st place in the morning session of Poster Presentations in the area of Arts, Humanities and Performance.
According to their Advisor, Prof. Ana C Thomé Williams, at NU, second year students of Portuguese interact by video-conference with native speakers of Portuguese. . The data collected in these interactions help us understand how these interactions take place and how they facilitate learning through conversation. The results can define subsequent steps on language pedagogy for advanced courses in the language. Keyla Carvalho and Augusta Saraiva studied the acquisition of vocabulary in Portuguese by Spanish speakers and non-Spanish Speakers within these interactions. Their research sought to answer these questions:
What's the impact of Spanish knowledge in vocabulary acquisition? How do Spanish speakers negotiate meaning? How do they compare with non-speakers of Spanish?