Antonia Yétúndé Fælárìn Schleicher 1402 Van Hise 262-6537 (Office) 262-2487 (Department office) 265-7905 (NALRC)

Antonia Schleicher earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Within the UW-Madison Department of African Languages and Literature she has taught African linguistics, Yoruba language and culture at all levels, as well as Yoruba life and civilization. Her major linguistics research areas have been in the interface between phonology and morphology, and in experimental phonetics. In addition, her interests in foreign language learning and teaching led her into doing research in second language acquisition (SLA) and as a result she developed a new course for graduate students titled "African Language Teaching Methods: Research and Practice."

Her main area of research in second language acquisition is in the role of culture in foreign language learning. Using examples from different aspects of Yoruba culture, she seeks to show how cultural contexts are very crucial in foreign language acquisition. To use a language out of its appropriate cultural contexts can lead to a lot of miscommunication.

Her research in the area of language and culture also led her into looking at various ways of bringing foreign culture to students in their learning environment through multimedia technology. As a result, she developed an interactive, multimedia CD-ROM for learning Yoruba language and culture. This CD-ROM, which accompanies her book Jê K'Á Sæ Yorùbá (Yale University Press, 1993) now serves as a model for other less commonly taught languages. She is currently doing research on the role of technology in foreign language acquisition. She is also working on computer analysis and patterns in pronunciation. The goal is to investigate how learners acquire the sounds of a foreign language they are learning.

Schleicher is the former president of the African Language Teachers Association (ALTA) and the current president of the National Council of Organizations of the Less Commonly Taught Languages. She is also a former program chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Teaching Academy.