This study explored teachers’ beliefs about pronunciation instruction in Spanish as a second language (L2). An online survey was used to collect data from 100 participants, grouped into 4 categories based on their previous training in principles and methods of pronunciation instruction. This article reports results from 15 survey items which covered participants’ beliefs regarding 6 major themes: the importance of pronunciation, how pronunciation develops, when to teach it, what to teach, how to teach, and who can teach. Although the results revealed several areas where more methods‐related coursework meant greater alignment between Spanish teachers’ beliefs and findings of L2 pronunciation research, there were other topics on which instructors with more training were likely to express beliefs contrasting with the state of the art. For instance, respondents with more coursework tended to accord more value to pronunciation instruction, to set more pronunciation‐related goals for language instruction, and to reject delaying a focus on pronunciation. Unexpectedly, however, some seemed to uphold the native speaker model, suggesting that teacher training and professional development programs may need to emphasize research‐informed practices and the importance of pedagogical expertise over nativelike pronunciation.
Most dialects of Spanish seem to produce prenuclear pitch peaks displaced to the right of the stressed syllable in neutral declarative utterances. In Autosegmental-Metrical phonology, this delayed peak has usually been described as a L*+H pitch accent. Since evidence for this observation comes almost exclusively from production studies, the purpose of this paper was to investigate how Spanish speakers perceive prenuclear pitch alignment. Perception was tested using an imitation task aimed at capturing categorical effects (or lack thereof) in the perception of intonation. The stimuli consisted of the utterance "La nena lloraba" ["The girl was crying"], where the prenuclear pitch peak in "nena" was displaced 10 times in 25millisecond increments. Seventeen native speakers of Spanish listened to the 10 resynthesized utterances and were asked to imitate each stimulus while being recorded. Resulting utterances were normalized for speech rate and analyzed acoustically for prenuclear pitch alignment. Data yielded a clear categorical perception effect, but did not necessarily lend support to a pitch accent with a delayed peak. The discussion addresses phonological representations of tonal events and the link between production and perception in prosody.
Previous studies have shown that learners’ individual differences (e.g., motivation, age) can impact second language learners’ pronunciation. This study focused on one individual difference that has received relatively little attention, namely personality, and sought to determine to what extent personality accounts for learners’ L2 accent during quasispontaneous and unplanned speech. Fifty-one English-speaking learners of Spanish performed a speaking task that was scored for degree of L2 accentedness. Results revealed that personality explained a considerable portion of the variance, and that extraversion and neuroticism were significant predictors of L2 accent.
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