October 30, 2024

More than words: How emotion in storytelling led to a PhD

Dr Lilián Ariztimuño’s passion for language teaching uncovered how the ensemble of words, voice and facial expression work together to create affectual meaning

Dr Lilián Ariztimuño has always been in love with storytelling. Inspired by a passion for linguistics and language, Dr Ariztimuño has spent more than twenty years teaching English as an additional language to students and pre-service teachers.  

The decision to move to Australia to chase her academic dream was a mammoth undertaking, relocating from Argentina with her husband and young son. 

Yesterday (Wednesday 30 October) Dr Ariztimuño graduated from the University of Wollongong (UOW) with a PhD in English Language and Linguistics from the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry. 

Dr Ariztimuño’s research centers around how speech conveys emotion in more than words. Her passion lies in the area of phonetics and phonology, how sounds create meaning in English. 

“Being myself, I’m someone who's very connected with emotions. I'm very conscious that we share and interpret emotions not only in what we say, but also in how we say it. We’ve all had the experience of saying or hearing someone say, ‘oh, it wasn't what they said it was the way they said it’,” Dr Ariztimuño said. 

As a linguist specialising in English as an additional language in Argentina, at the Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, something she kept coming back to over the years was how challenging it could be for pre-service teachers to express emotion in English.  

“If you're an English speaker yourself, you learn all of these things intuitively by speaking the language, but if you speak English as an additional language, we don't have all those tools at hand. We need more awareness of how we can become more empathetic efficient communicators, learning to produce emotion in speech effectively and to listen as well.” 

In Argentina Dr Ariztimuño noticed her students, future teachers of English as an additional language, were struggling to understand and express emotion when speaking.  

For her master’s degree, she started researching the need for tools to describe how words and sounds convey emotion in speech in a hope to better inform best practice for teaching English. 

“One of the things that we do as teachers of English is we usually work with fairy tales. The stories are a way into the culture of the language and emotion plays a key role. 

“It is the story genre that we usually use to share values and attitudes, and these go beyond the words.” 

In 2018, Dr Ariztimuño took a leap of faith and applied to UOW to undertake her PhD to further her research and work with global leaders in the field of linguistics. 

It took the support of her wider family and community in Argentina to make the relocation to Australia a reality. Dr Ariztimuño successfully secured two scholarships from the UOW, the International Postgraduate Tuition Awards (IPTA) and the University Postgraduate Award (UPA) which provided the essential financial support needed to relocate with her husband and five-year-old son. 

^{Dr Lilian Ariztimuno celebrating her graduation with her son and husband}

“I wanted to further my studies, to look into all the semiotic resources [symbols that share meanings] we use to express emotion: the words, the sounds, the facial expression, and the gestures. The things that are usually interpreted as they work together. I mainly wanted to make all of these things that we do with our voice as conscious as possible. 

“I'm part of the Systemic Functional Linguistic Community, and I knew the work by Michael Halliday, Ruqaiya Hasan, Christian Matthiessen, Jim Martin, Susan Hood and the like.  

“I started to look into UOW due to the work of Associate Professor Shoshana Dreyfus and Associate Professor Alison Moore. It seemed like the perfect fit. Shooshi and Alison were helpful from my very first email, and they later went on to be my PhD supervisors, and both are my colleagues five years on from that initial email. 

“There's an emotional, intellectual and physical investment for not only the PhD candidate, but also the supervisors as well.”

After arriving in Wollongong, the obstacles were far from over. Barely getting into the swing of a new country, a new home, starting her PhD and working as a casual teacher, the COVID pandemic unfolded. 

Her thesis, titled, The Multi-Semiotic Expression of Emotion in Storytelling Performances of Cinderella: A Focus on Verbal, Vocal and Facial Resources, explored the power of storytelling with a particular focus on how emotion is conveyed in spoken language using a sample of childhood stories.  

Due to COVID lockdowns Dr Ariztimuño had to rethink her PhD research approach. Contacting professional storytellers via Facebook she was able to analyse the spoken text of eight performances of Cinderella recorded by a group of generous professional storytellers.  

“The key moment in Cinderella when Cinderella is discussing wanting to go to the ball with her stepmother and sisters, the line ‘no, Cinderella, you have no clothes, you can’t go to the ball. Everyone would laugh at you’, can be said and then interpreted in many different ways depending greatly on the power of the voice. It could be comical, mocking or sympathetic. 

“My research uncovered ways to make these deeper values more visible or audible or listenable by being aware of how emotions are conveyed by combinations of choices in pitch, volume, tempo and many other vocal features.” 

^{Associate Professor Alison Moore, Dr Lilián Ariztimuño and Associate Professor Shoshana Dreyfus at graduation, October 2024}

Alongside completing her PhD Dr Ariztimuño was home schooling her son, dealing with the isolation of lockdowns and associated stress of being so far away from her family and friends, and the added challenge of having to adapt her teaching to online learning.  

“My teaching philosophy is human centered. We are all human beings. The most important thing I kept in mind during that transition to online learning was that we were all going to make mistakes and that was just fine. I wanted to connect with students intellectually, emotionally and let them know that even with all the tools we had there were still shortcomings we would have to overcome, being open about that.” 

Her advice to others pursuing their PhD and faced with adversity is to tackle it “one paragraph at a time and keep the purpose, the driving force that initiated your research in mind”. 

“My PhD gave me the opportunity to offer the research and teaching community tools they can use.” 

From a research pipe dream in Argentina to an Associate Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Linguistics, Dr Ariztimuño’s journey at UOW came full circle at graduation yesterday as her husband and son cheered her on. 

“The support from the UOW community and also the Systemic Functional Linguistic Community as a whole has been incredible. It's a beautiful community of people. I can't wait to give back.”