Tatjana Paunovic | University of Niš (original) (raw)

Papers by Tatjana Paunovic

Phonetica

Uptalk has been increasingly documented in different L1 English varieties and communicative conte... more Uptalk has been increasingly documented in different L1 English varieties and communicative contexts, but is rarely recognized in formal L2 educational contexts, where it is still attributed to learners’ inadequate mastery of intonation. This study is a cross-sectional corpus-based exploration of the phonetic realization of uptalk in Serbian EFL students’ semi-spontaneous expository speech, and its perception as a sentence-finality signal. The corpus comprised all rising intonation units (IU) produced by 14 female and 9 male participants, classified by structural clues as syntactic continuation, listing, polar questions, or uptalk, to explore the relatedness of the phonetic properties to structural position and gender. Next, 100 EFL students rated selected phrases, illustrating continuation rises, uptalk, and final falls, as possibly sentence final, on a 5-point scale. The findings showed that uptalk was consistently produced as a phonetically distinct signal, characterized by a lar...

Focus on English Phonetics is the third collection of papers created by scholars gathered around ... more Focus on English Phonetics is the third collection of papers created by scholars gathered around the Belgrade International Meeting of English Phoneticians, started in 2008 by Professor Biljana Cubrovic of the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade. After Ta(l)king English Phonetics Across Frontiers (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) and Exploring English Phonetics (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), this collection represents a further step in the same direction. As with the preceding books, this volume aims to bring together researchers in the rich field of English phonetics, and provide them with a forum for exchanging ideas and research experience. The 18 contributors to this volume come from different linguistic and academic backgrounds, and from nine different countries. As a result, the volume reflects the authors' diversity by both its breadth and tenor. The topics discussed, the research approaches used, and the variety of theoretical, applied and experimental aspects of phonetic investigations all speak of this diversity, a very desirable quality in any field of research.

Facta Universitatis, Series: Linguistics and Literature

This paper discusses the concept of critical thinking and its place in university education today... more This paper discusses the concept of critical thinking and its place in university education today, internationally as well as in the Serbian and regional Balkan contexts. As an illustration, the second part of the paper offers a review of Gordon Asher’s chapter in Writing Your Thesis: A Guide for Postgraduate Students, a coursebook which incorporates the conception of criticality in higher education, from the perspective of Critical Pedagogy. We highlight the importance of embracing a broad, epistemological understanding of critical thinking, not only as an applicable pragmatic skill, but, rather, as a way back to a more humanistic view of education as emancipation and whole-person development of individuals, for the benefit of both the individual and the society. Lastly, we discuss the importance of methodological tools in teaching for critical thinking.

Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2009

Highlighting some interesting and intriguing aspects of English phonetics and phonology from a va... more Highlighting some interesting and intriguing aspects of English phonetics and phonology from a variety of perspectives, this book brings up a number of empirical questions in order to emphasize the necessity of taking a very broad view of what spoken English means in today's socio-cultural context. English has become a truly global means of communication, used as a first, second, or additional language by millions and millions of diverse speakers, in a multitude of different communicative contexts, so that the very notions of native and non-native seem to have changed profoundly, as have the notions of central/ peripheral and standard/ non-standard with regard to English varieties spoken around the globe. Therefore, today more than ever before, in studying English phonetics many small research steps need to be taken to provide diverse and broad empirical data from as many different standpoints as possible. This collection indeed looks at English phonetics from a wide spectrum of perspectives, including those of native or EFL speakers, language varieties, L2 language teaching and learning, as well as language contact, development, and change.

Journal of Contemporary Philology, 2022

Zbornik Matice srpske za filologiju i lingvistiku, 2022

This paper presents a corpus-based study of the temporal properties of read speech in EFL, compar... more This paper presents a corpus-based study of the temporal properties of read speech in EFL, compared to L1 English and L1 Serbian, and the perception of its fluency by two groups of listeners-students and teachers. The analysis included acoustic measurements of variables, grouped together as speech-rate, pause, and disfluency variables. The listeners rated all the speech samples on a 5-point likert scale. The findings showed that EFL differed from L1 English by lower speech-rate variables, fewer pauses overall, but more within-IU pauses and disfluences. It showed no mother-tongue influence for speech-rate, but did for pauses and the mean length of run. Some temporal properties were significant predictors of (dis)fluency. The L1 Serbian corpus revealed some dialect-specific temporal properties.

Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies

The present study offers a quantitative and acoustic analysis of a corpus of spontaneous speech p... more The present study offers a quantitative and acoustic analysis of a corpus of spontaneous speech produced by Serbian EFL students, in terms of intonation unit organization (tonality), nucleus placement (tonicity), and the realization of nuclear pitch contours (tone). The results show that, regarding tonality, the participants' spontaneous speech was characterized by numerous interruptions and hesitations, with comparatively few complete IUs. Regarding tonicity, the nucleus was almost invariably placed in the default position (the last stressed syllable). And in terms of tone, quite different nuclear pitch contours were produced in sentence-internal (continuing) and sentence-final intonation units, although in both structural positions the participants used both falling and rising contours. The phonetic parameters of pitch height, span, slope, alignment, duration, and intensity all proved to be relevant for these distinctions.

This paper presents the findings of a study of the acoustic properties of Serbian EFL students&#3... more This paper presents the findings of a study of the acoustic properties of Serbian EFL students' vowels. The participants were 12 junior-year students of the English Department. Their vowel production was recorded in three different contexts, i.e. speaking tasks: reading words in citation form, reading a text aloud, and speaking. The acoustic measurements included vowel duration and F1 and F2 formant frequency values. The results showed that neither the production of vowel qualities nor the duration differences used by the students were without problems

Poznan Stud Contemp Linguist, 2009

Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2000

"The tangled web: Intercultural Communicative Competence in EFL" addresses the issue of... more "The tangled web: Intercultural Communicative Competence in EFL" addresses the issue of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) as a goal and desired outcome of the process of L2 learning and teaching, particularly in the very complex and still controversial context of English as a foreign language. The book focuses on EFL learners in formal educational contexts in Serbia, and on the 'receiving' end of the communication channel, that is, the question of how EFL learners construct meaning through the interpretation of various cues in intercultural encounters. The monograph presents three previously unpublished empirical studies in which qualitative methodology was applied. The author also emphasizes the importance of the study of spoken communication, in which in addition to the issues of genre and register, level of formality, verbal and non-verbal elements of face-to-face communication and conversational context, the role of prosody is a particularly importan...

ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries, 2008

Editors: SMILJANA KOMAR and UROŠ MOZETIČ Slovensko društvo za angleške študije Slovene Associatio... more Editors: SMILJANA KOMAR and UROŠ MOZETIČ Slovensko društvo za angleške študije Slovene Association for the Study of English Oddelek za anglistiko in amerikanistiko, Filozofska fakulteta, Univerza v Ljubljani Editors: SMILJANA KOMAR and UROŠ MOZETIČ Slovensko društvo za angleške študije Slovene Association for the Study of English Oddelek za anglistiko in amerikanistiko, Filozofska fakulteta, Univerza v Ljubljani Editorial Secretary Gašper Ilc Proofreading Jason Blake Editorial Policy ELOPE. English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries is a journal devoted to the research and academic discussion of linguistic and literary issues from theoretical and applied perspectives regardless of school of thought or methodology. Its aim is to promote original enquiry into linguistics, literary and translation studies, language and literature teaching with the main focus on English. ELOPE will publish two issues per year. Subscription for 2008 costs 12,50 EUROS. Members of the Slovene association for the study of English are entitled to a free copy. Summary Discourse Intonation (DI) (Brazil 1997; Chun 2002) seems to be particularly well suited for use in the EFL classroom, much more so than the rather complex traditional models (e.g. O'Connor and Arnold 1973) or some recent phonological theories. Yet if L2 teachers are to be provided with clear guidelines on how to incorporate DI into communicative language teaching, much more empirical research is needed with L2 students of different L1 backgrounds to uncover the specific problems they face. e small-scale study presented here examines how 15 second-year students of the English Department in Niš manage intonation in a reading task. e analysis focuses on the components singled out by Chun as crucial for language learners: sentence stress (nuclear tone placement), terminal contour (direction of pitch change) and key (pitch range at transition points).