Here is what the participants had to say about the ViTraLiP experience! 

"I thoroughly enjoyed the joint Speech Perception class run by Paris City University and University of Cologne. In any master’s-level class, each student brings their own interests and specialties into the classroom, offering new ways of seeing linguistic phenomena to their peers. This effect is only enhanced when such classes are co-taught by universities in different countries, allowing the best aspects of different educational approaches to contribute to an even greater diversity of perspectives. Our joint class also culminated in a conference kindly organised by the instructors, where students had the opportunity to give and attend interesting talks. Not only was it wonderful to meet in person, but being able to ask questions, share our own research, and receive feedback for it in such a setting felt far less daunting than doing so at conferences attended by well-established academics in the field. I had a thoroughly enjoyable time and will be advising students to take this class- and the opportunities it offers- next year."  —Sophie Weller

 

"A must-pick course! I really enjoyed it from start to finish. The trip to meet all students and the course lecturers was even more enriching. I picked this course following my innate tentation to reconcile with my acquisition of phonetics and phonology. The course content and structure turned out to be beyond what I expected. I got to enrich my knowledge of this realm through interactional seminar session, encompassing reading studies, analyzing and discussing their relevant points in a motivating academic atmosphere. It might have been a bit of an overload of new information at first, but I quickly got to adapt to the latter. I further enjoyed our trip to Paric Cité where we all finally met and had the opportunity to exchange thoughts, topic ideas and ways of thinking. I can safely say I got contaminated by Paris Cité fond love of phonetics and general speech production. The overall experience allowed me to obtain a better insight into the realm and a much deeper respect for phoneticians." —Dina Kaicer

 

"Before this course, I had been actively and successfully avoiding phonetics and phonology courses, as I found them very challenging and held a prejudice that the field was mostly about physics, leaving little room for linguistics. However, this course was highly student-centered and adjusted to our prior knowledge and readiness, which helped me engage more confidently. Contrary to my expectations, the knowledge I gained was both relevant and empowering, allowing me to connect two areas of interest, sociolinguistics and phonetics, and design an interdisciplinary project on the acoustic characteristics of gay speech. I also had the opportunity to present this work at our culminating mini-conference, where I received valuable feedback from both classmates and professors. What I appreciated most about the class was that both Doris and Ilona gave us the space to design our own research experiment. Being encouraged to design, present and even conduct our own empirical research even at the master's level was very motivating for me." —Ali Yıldız