Nauczyciel wobec współczesnych zjawisk stresogennych w miejscu pracy – wielowymiarowość konsekwencji i przyczyn

The aim of the article is to show the characteristics of the phenomenon of professional stress in the teaching profession. Professional stress is a phenomenon that is gaining momentum in the modern world, along with economic, demographic or social changes. The profession of a teacher is part of a pool of professions characterized by a very high risk of stress within it, due to the necessity of working with other people. All the stressful factors that a teacher encounters at school undoubtedly affect their functioning, mental and physical condition and, as a result, the quality of modern education. Therefore, in the considerations I will deal with the subject of teachers’ professional stress as a still-present and growing problem, with particular emphasis on the stressful phenomena that occur in the place of employment of the main character of the article and the reasons for their occurrence. The review of the scientific literature and research reports from this area aided the illustration of a number of consequences that the stress burden in this professional group entails, not only for the teachers themselves, but also their family, relatives, the students with whom they work, and the functioning of the institution in which they are employed.Celem artykułu jest ukazanie charakterystyki zjawiska stresu zawodowego w zawodzie nauczyciela. Stres zawodowy jest zjawiskiem przybierającym na sile we współczesnym świecie wraz z dokonującymi się przemianami ekonomicznymi, demograficznymi czy też społecznymi. Zawód nauczyciela wpisuje się w pulę zawodów charakteryzujących się bardzo dużym ryzykiem występowania stresu w jego obrębie, z racji konieczności podejmowania w nim pracy z drugim człowiekiem. Wszystkie czynniki stresogenne, z którymi styka się nauczyciel w szkole, mają wpływ na jego funkcjonowanie, kondycję psychiczną i fizyczną, a w rezultacie rzutują na jakość współczesnego kształcenia. Dlatego w rozważaniach podjęto tematykę stresu zawodowego nauczycieli jako problemu aktualnego i przybierającego na sile, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem zjawisk stresogennych, jakie występują w miejscu zatrudnienia głównego bohatera artykułu, i przyczyn ich występowania. Dokonany przegląd literatury naukowej oraz raportów z badań z tego obszaru pozwolił na pokazanie szeregu konsekwencji, jakie niesie za sobą obciążenie stresem w tej grupie zawodowej, nie tylko dla samej osoby nauczyciela, ale też jego rodziny, najbliższych, ucznia, z którym pracuje, jak i funkcjonowania placówki, w której jest zatrudniony

Gender-Specific Teacher Expectations and Stereotypes Observed in Interactions with Students

This article is a report from research on gender stereotyping of students by teachers. The aim of the study was to verify whether teachers show a tendency to stereotype students by gender in their work. School, or specifically teacher-student interactions, was chosen as the research area because it constitutes a critical and powerful socialising agenda that provides a permanent social and physical context for children’s activities and identity formation. To analyse this phenomenon, a survey was conducted on 133 primary school teachers in Poland. The study shows that teacher gender-specific expectations affect both boys and girls in the school environment; however, their distribution is not even across all studied areas of interaction. The studied tendency was found to be relatively low for questions about gender role expectations towards children. However, an opposite trend was discovered with regard to the frequency and type of teachers’ interactions with girls and boys

Recovering implicit pitch contours from formants in whispered speech

Whispered speech is characterised by a noise-like excitation that results in the lack of fundamental frequency. Considering that prosodic phenomena such as intonation are perceived through f0 variation, the perception of whispered prosody is relatively difficult. At the same time, studies have shown that speakers do attempt to produce intonation when whispering and that prosodic variability is being transmitted, suggesting that intonation "survives" in whispered formant structure. In this paper, we aim to estimate the way in which formant contours correlate with an "implicit" pitch contour in whisper, using a machine learning model. We propose a two-step method: using a parallel corpus, we first transform the whispered formants into their phonated equivalents using a denoising autoencoder. We then analyse the formant contours to predict phonated pitch contour variation. We observe that our method is effective in establishing a relationship between whispered and phonated formants and in uncovering implicit pitch contours in whisper.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, Accepted at ICPhS 202

Gemination Strategies in L1 And English Pronunciation of Polish Learners

Polish is a language where true geminates appear and the occurrence of a double consonant letter in spelling corresponds with double or at least prolonged consonant articulation regardless of the morphological structure of the word. The above principle also concerns most borrowings, such as the English word ‘hobby’, for instance. In English, true geminates do not occur and a morpheme-internal double consonant letter is only a fairly reliable indication of the way the preceding vowel should be pronounced. This discrepancy may lead to negative transfer in Polish learners of English. Our recent research of native Polish speech (Rojczyk and Porzuczek, in press) generally confirmed the results reported by Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996), among others, who found geminates to be 1.5-3 times longer than singletons. In our study we investigate the influence of double consonant letters on L1 and English pronunciation of Polish learners. They read trochaic family names containing intervocalic . Each name is preceded by a first name suggesting the nationality (Polish, English, German or Italian) of the person mentioned. By placing each tested item in a Polish and an English semantically and rhythmically equivalent sentences (This is .../To jest...), we measure the level of consonant length variation with respect to the language in which the potential geminates appear, the language context and the learning experience of the students. In this way we collect evidence and formulate observations concerning the learners’ awareness of the status of geminates in various languages and the probability of transfer in EFL learning

Speaker-independent neural formant synthesis

We describe speaker-independent speech synthesis driven by a small set of phonetically meaningful speech parameters such as formant frequencies. The intention is to leverage deep-learning advances to provide a highly realistic signal generator that includes control affordances required for stimulus creation in the speech sciences. Our approach turns input speech parameters into predicted mel-spectrograms, which are rendered into waveforms by a pre-trained neural vocoder. Experiments with WaveNet and HiFi-GAN confirm that the method achieves our goals of accurate control over speech parameters combined with high perceptual audio quality. We also find that the small set of phonetically relevant speech parameters we use is sufficient to allow for speaker-independent synthesis (a.k.a. universal vocoding).Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Article accepted at INTERSPEECH 202

Acoustic-phonetic realisation of Polish syllable prominence: a corpus study.

Malisz Z, Wagner P. Acoustic-phonetic realisation of Polish syllable prominence: a corpus study. In: Gibbon D, Hirst D, Campbell N, eds. Rhythm, melody and harmony in speech. Studies in honour of Wiktor Jassem. Speech and Language Technology. Vol 14/15. Poznań, Poland; 2012: 105-114

Voicing in Polish: interactions with lexical stress and focus

Malisz Z, Żygis M. Voicing in Polish: interactions with lexical stress and focus. In: 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow; In Press.We examine the dynamics of VOT in Polish stops under lexical stress and focus. We elicit real Polish words containing voiced and voiceless stop+/a/ syllables in primary, secondary and unstressed, as well as focus positions. We also correlate VOT with speech rate estimated on the basis of equisyllabic word length. Our results show that the relationships between prosody and VOT are consistent with the status of Polish as a true voicing language

Recording and transcription of speech and gesture in the narration of Polish adults and children

In the present paper, the experimental procedure, the details of sound and video recording set-up as well as the system for speech and gesture transciption and coding used in the Polish Cartoon Narration Corpus (PCNC) project are described. The audio-visual data come from a cartoon narration task performed by both children and adults. The recordings are transcribed orthographically and phonemically, and labelled for selected phenomena on a number of levels, including gesture, lexicon, prosody, and dialogue acts.In the present paper, the experimental procedure, the details of sound and video recording set-up as well as the system for speech and gesture transciption and coding used in the Polish Cartoon Narration Corpus (PCNC) project are described. The audio-visual data come from a cartoon narration task performed by both children and adults. The recordings are transcribed orthographically and phonemically, and labelled for selected phenomena on a number of levels, including gesture, lexicon, prosody, and dialogue acts

Micro-timing of backchannels in human-robot interaction

Inden B, Malisz Z, Wagner P, Wachsmuth I. Micro-timing of backchannels in human-robot interaction. Presented at the Timing in Human-Robot Interaction: Workshop in Conjunction with the 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI2014), Bielefeld, Germany