Serra Hunter fellow in English Linguistics at the University of Barcelona.
Dr Aliaga holds a PhD in English Philology from the University of Barcelona and is also a member of the L2 Speech Research Group, investigating the acquisition of L2 speech in all of its perceptual and productive dimensions. Dr. Aliaga specializes in English phonetics and phonetic training methodology for pronunciation teaching. Her research and teaching are driven by a keen interest in narrowing the gap between lab research and the foreign language classroom. She completed a PhD in 'The effect of auditory and articulatory phonetic training on the perception and production of L2 vowels by Catalan-Spanish learners of English' and has been able to directly apply research findings on L2 speech learning to the pronunciation classroom, engaging learners to participating in speech training tasks involving the perception and production of English speech sounds. Dr. Aliaga is a member of a funded research project on 'Pronunciation and phono-lexical representations in Spanish EFL learners.' Her research is focused on (1) assessing the effectiveness of form-focused instruction and enhanced high-variability phonetic training in improving pronunciation and comprehensibility, and (2) examining the extent to which treatments interact with individual differences in vocabulary size and attentional skills.
