The World Languages Association and the platform Extempore awarded UM professors Cristina Chiusano and Pedro Luchini a research grant that has allowed them to take on a new project in collaboration with a public Argentinian university.

Chiusano is the coordinator of the Masters in English Language and Intercultural Bilingual Education, proposed in 2021 and officially beginning in 2022. She is a professor of English, with a masters in Spanish as a Second Language Education and a doctorate in Linguistics from the Universidad de la República. Luchini is a professor and researcher at the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, as well as a professor on the program at the UM.

The researchers presented a project called “Using Extempore to Enhance L2 Pronunciation: An Innovative Approach to Prioritizing Intelligibility and Intercultural Awareness.” They proposed to explore how AI tools can help the learning of second languages (English, in this case) using communication tasks and individual and peer feedback to develop metacognitive strategies.

Chiusano described how the project is currently in its planning phase. They are designing the course, the tasks, and pre and post-tests used to obtain a linguistic corpus that can be quantified later on. Later on, the study will include students on the English Education degree at a public university in Argentina. It is expected to be completed by the end of May 2025.