Current projects
Spanish/Linguistics Language Pedagogy
Conferences and Publications
To appear Sandoval, Jordan, and Kirsten Drickey. “Why Teach Linguistics to L2 Learners: Evidence from the WWU Spanish Language Program.” Chapter in Linguistic Foundations for Second Language Teaching and Learning. Under contract, Cambridge University Press, publication date: May 2023
2023 Sandoval, Jordan, and Kirsten Drickey. “Including Linguistic Perspectives to Increase Learner Confidence.” Presented at 105th American Association for Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese Conference, June 2023, Salamanca, Spain.
2023 Bash, Mae, Sylvia Cohen, Jordan Sandoval, and Kendra Sutton. “Teaching Pronunciation in the Spanish Classroom: Improving Student Perception and Production in Spanish Using Phonologically Informed Curriculum.” Presented at Washington Association for Language Teaching Conference, April 2023, Bellingham, WA.
2022 Sandoval, Jordan, Kirsten Drickey, Maria Jose Palacios Figueroa, and Brahm VanWoerden. “Collaborative Mentorship: Resetting Student/Teacher Expectations and Improving our Learning and Teaching through Unconventional Teacher Training.” 104th AATSP Conference, July 2022, San Juan, Puerto Rico.
2021 de Vries, Spencer, Kirsten Drickey, Maria Jose Palacios Figueroa, Jordan Sandoval, & Brahm VanWoerden. “Improving student willingness to communicate through explicit L2 phonological instruction.” Presented at 12th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference. April, (online)
2021 de Vries, Spencer, Kirsten Drickey, Maria Jose Palacios Figueroa, Jordan Sandoval, & Brahm VanWoerden. “Teaching tip: using goal-based in-class activities to help students discover phonological features of Spanish.” Presented at 12th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference. April, (online)
2020 Sandoval, J., Drickey, K., Brill, N., & Van Woerden, B. (2020). “More, better, earlier: Developing targeted linguistics strategies for Spanish pronunciation.” In O. Kang, S. Staples, K. Yaw, & K. Hirschi (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching conference, ISSN 2380-9566, Northern Arizona University, September 2019 (pp. 280–291). Ames, IA: Iowa State University
2020 Brill, Nancy, Kirsten Drickey, Ellen Golden, Jordan Sandoval, Brahm VanWoerden, and Autumn Weiss. “Que hablen asi: Effects of explicit phonological instruction for L2 Spanish learners.” Presentation at 14th Annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium, May, Cornell University (online)
2020 Brill, Nancy, Brahm VanWoerden, Ellen Golden, Autumn Weiss, Kirsten Drickey, and Jordan Sandoval. “Methods of Phonological Training and its effects on L2 Production and Confidence.” Presentation at Northwest Linguistics Conference, April, University of Washington (online).
2020 Brill, Nancy, Brahm vanWoerden, Kirsten Drickey, and Jordan Sandoval. “Effects of explicit pronunciation training in Spanish.” Presentation at Penn Linguistics Conference, March, (online)
2019 Brill, Nancy, Kirsten Drickey, Jordan Sandoval and Brahm Van Woerden. “More, Better, Earlier…” Presentation at Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching conference. September, Northern Arizona University, AZ
2018 Drickey, Kirsten, Maria Jose Palacios Figuera and Jordan Sandoval. “Sí se puede: Moving Toward Pronunciation Accuracy and Confidence through Early Phonology Intervention in Spanish-Language Classrooms.” Presented at Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Annual Meeting. November, Bellingham, WA
A website: Talleres Guacamayo
This website introduces you to our Spanish language pronunciation pedagogy project, along with providing some resources to explore or use.
Sounds and Letters in Perception and Production (SLIPP) Lab
The main lab space
Lab meetings and data analysis take place in this comfy dungeon office
Where to find us
A map of WWU's campus - the SLIPP lab is located in the basement of Miller Hall just off Red Square
Our recording booth
Able to be used for a variety of high-quality recording needs as well as utilized in the creation of experimental materials and elicited data
Located in the basement level of Miller Hall (MH 021A) at Western Washington University, the SLIPP Lab investigates orthographic representations (writing and spelling), mental phonological representation (how we think of and perceive sounds), phonetic auditory realizations (how we actually say sounds and words), and the relationship between these three domains.
The SLIPP Lab was officially formed in Fall of 2020, but the lab’s supervising researcher, Dr. Jordan Sandoval, has long been interested in the topics the lab investigates. Her 2008 dissertation, entitled “Phonetic Reflexes Of Orthographic Characteristics In Lexical Representation”, describes several experiments in which diverse spellings of the same sound (phoneme) in word final position produce minute changes in pronunciation. In these experiments, “a significant effect of orthography on sound durations was found, such that coda consonants spelled with more letters corresponded to longer sound durations” (Brewer, 2008). Though interestingly, this effect was only present in experiments that examined existing English words. Experiments run with novel words failed to result in the same significant durational differences. These findings reveal a level of interconnection between spelling, sounds, and meaning that linguists do not yet fully understand. It remains unclear whether speakers of English can hear the minute durational differences described in Dr. Sandoval’s dissertation, which begs the question, if speakers aren’t hearing these differences, why are they producing them and why are they only producing them with words that mean something to them.
In 2019-2020, Dr. Sandoval acted as the advisor for another experiment investigating the connection and interaction between sounds and meaning. The experiment, conducted by student Eli George, examined phonological vs. semantic constraints in novel frozen binomial pairs. As described by George (2020) in the writeup of his work, “Binomials are pairs of words, often of the same grammatical category, that are frequently found alongside one another. Examples in English include “salt and pepper,” “mom and dad,” or “rock and roll.” A frozen binomial is a pair of words that not only often appear together, but that consistently appear in the same order. Each of the three examples above is considered a frozen (or sometimes, “irreversible”) binomial. Brief preliminary testing has revealed that English speakers find the reverse of these frozen binomials (“pepper and salt,” “dad and mom,” “roll and rock”) not nearly as well-formed as their 'correctly' ordered counterparts”. There are both phonological and semantic traits that have been found to predict the “correct” order of these frozen binomials: a phonological trait would be for example the number of syllables in the word (the word with more syllables tends to go last) whereas a semantic trait would be age of the thing/person described (the elder object/person tends to go first). George’s experiment used novel (made up) pairs of words whose semantic traits suggested one order (according to previously observed patterns in English) while their phonological traits pushed for the opposite.
In Spring of 2021, Sylvia Cohen presented the findings of another study under the advisement of Dr. Sandoval. This experiment dealt with the silent letter ‘l’ in words like walk, talk, and palm, and hoped to discover whether an orthographically present silent letter could influence phonological representations and phonetic realizations of words. To examine the role of the silent letter in these words, Cohen compared them to words like wok, tok, and pom. These word pairs are largely considered homophonous in English, however a large body of existing research has proven that accepted homophonous word pairs may actually retain some phonetic differences linked to their differing meanings, frequency, and spelling, among other traits. Cohen’s experiment analyzed data from 20 speakers and found that there was an observable difference in the words containing silent ‘l’ that ended in the sound /k/: on average these words contained vowels that took up more of the word and final consonants that took up less as compared to their ‘l’-less counterparts. Several hypotheses could explain this behavior. See the Section 2: Methods of Cohen’s writeup for a thorough discussion of these competing hypotheses.
Going forward, the SLIPP Lab is interested in pursuing research that examines orthography as a window into speakers’ internal perception of sounds, the benefits and downsides of using orthography to teach second language pronunciation, the value of unconventional spelling systems in second language instruction and beyond, and the behavior of non-English orthographies.
If you have questions or would like to learn more about current lab operations, reach out to Jordan.Sandoval@wwu.edu.
My students' work!!!
2021-22 Sylvia Cohen: Effects of orthographic silent ‘l’ on preceding vowel duration
"Effects of orthographic silent ‘l’ on preceding vowel duration" by Sylvia Cohen (wwu.edu)
2020-22 Brahm vanWoerden: (Not) Speaking Spanish: Explicit Pronunciation Instruction in the Online High School Classroom
2020-21 Eli George: Competing Semantic and Phonological Constraints in Novel Binomials
"Competing Semantic and Phonological Constraints in Novel Binomials" by Eli George (wwu.edu)
2020-2021 Ruthie Myers: Daju Dar Daju: a brief description of the people and language
Home | Daju Dar daju (rmyers754.wixsite.com)
2019-2020 Graham Blair: Queer and Trans Terms of Endearment in BDSM Erotica
Blair-Sandoval 2020 - Google Drive
2019-2020 Emily Hillman: Question; can we talk about this discourse marker?