Leonardo Contreras Roa

Leonardo Contreras Roa

Associate Professor in English Phonetics and Phonology

CORPUS - EA 4295

Université de Picardie Jules Verne

I am a linguist, an English teacher and a phonetician.

I initially studied translation in Chile and was passionate about translation analysis—trying to understand how language structures and ideas are modified when someone translates them from one language to another.

I then became interested in language teaching, so I moved to France. There, I started teaching Spanish and then English. I realized that, just as structures and ideas are transformed when translated, so are the structures and sounds of a language when someone learns it as a second or foreign language.

My research currently consists in analyzing through phonetics how learners acquire the phonemes, rhythm and intonation of the language they are learning. I particularly enjoy working with big corpora of audio or video data to find regularities and try to make things out of them—i.e. understanding the way a learner's interlanguage behaves.

Interests

  • Phonetics (Segmental, Prosody)
  • Corpus linguistics
  • Language acquisition

Education

  • PhD in Linguistics and Didactics, 2019

    Université Rennes 2 (France)

  • MA in Linguistics and Didactics, 2014

    Université Rennes 2 (France)

  • BA in Translation (Spanish-English-French), 2011

    Universidad de Concepción (Chile)

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