Plenary speakers
Małgorzata Baran-Łucarz (Uniwersytet Wrocławski, Poland)
PhD, since 2004 affiliated with the University of Wrocław (Institute of English Studies; Department of Second Language Learning and Teaching); in the years 1998–2013 – a teacher and teacher trainer at the Teacher Training College in Wrocław. Her main areas of interest include: phonetics and pronunciation pedagogy, teacher development and training, Second Language Acquisition (particularly the matter of individual differences – aptitude, anxiety, personality, motivation, willingness to communicate – in relation to FL pronunciation acquisition/learning and teaching), inclusive education, and teaching EFL to older adults. She has presented at over 50 international conferences and symposiums worldwide, published numerous articles (e.g., in Canadian Modern Language Review, Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, Research in Language, International Journal of English Studies) and book chapters (published by e.g., John Benjamins, Routledge, Multilingual Matters, Springer), and edited two books – (2015). Refleksja w nauczaniu i uczeniu się języka obcego (Reflection in L2 learning and teaching). Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego; (2023). Contemporary issues in FL education. Springer Cham (co-authored). She has also conducted several workshops at international conferences and courses for in-service teachers in Poland on EFL pronunciation teaching.
Juli Cebrián (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain)
Juli Cebrian graduated in English Philology from the Universitat de Barcelona and holds an MA and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Toronto, Canada. He is Associate Professor at the department of English Philology at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in English phonetics and phonology, pronunciation teaching and learning, oral skills, second language acquisition and research methods. His research investigates the acquisition of the phonology of a second or foreign language (L2) by adult learners, with a special focus on the role of cross-linguistic perceived similarity in the categorization of L2 sounds, the effect of phonetic training on L2 perception and production, and the relationship between lexical categories and phonetic categories in L2 phonology. His research interests extend to experimental phonetics, bilingualism, psycholinguistics, ESL/EFL and the teaching of pronunciation. He has led and participated in a series of funded research projects on the acquisition of L2 speech and experimental phonetics. His publications include numerous contributions to international journals and specialized books. He is also the coauthor of a website on English phonetics and pronunciation resources (https://englishphoneticsbcn.com/) and a series of English practice books for Catalan/Spanish learners of English. See http://webs.uab.cat/julicebrian/.
Martha Pennington (Birkbeck University of London, UK)
Martha C. Pennington (PhD Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania) is an applied linguist and phonologist currently affiliated with Birkbeck University of London, and previously with the University of Hawaii and the City University of Hong Kong. Professor Pennington’s research and publication have focused on the learning and teaching of English as a second language, and her work has appeared in international journals such as Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, ELT Journal, Language and Education, Language Culture and Curriculum, Language Learning Journal, Language, RELC Journal, System, TESOL Quarterly, and World Englishes. Pennington is especially known for her work in pronunciation teaching. Recent contributions in this area include a special issue on Pronunciation Teaching for RELC Journal (volume 52.1, 2021) and the texts English Pronunciation Teaching and Research: Contemporary Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), co-authored with Pamela Rogerson-Revell, and The Pronunciation Book: A Language Teacher’s Guide (Equinox, forthcoming), scheduled to appear in the new Applied Phonology and Pronunciation Teaching series.
Radek Skarnitzl (Univerzita Karlova, Czech Republic)
Radek Skarnitzl is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic and has been the director of its Institute of Phonetics for over ten years. He is interested in various aspects of speech communication, with expertise in speech prosody, second language (L2) acquisition, and acoustic phonetics. His research focuses on several areas in speech communication. The first one is L2 pronunciation and the effect of various pronunciation features on the socio-psychological evaluation of a speaker in both native and foreign languages. His second area of research interests is related to speaker identification and forensic phonetics, especially the effects of voice disguise on human and automatic speaker recognition performance. In addition, he is interested in the prosodic properties of Czech, a language with very untypical prosodic make-up. He teaches courses in English phonetics and phonology, articulatory phonetics, methodology of pronunciation teaching, sociophonetics, or forensic phonetics.