Evidence-Based Design Principles for Spanish Pronunciation Teaching

Abstract

In spite of the considerable body of pedagogical and experimental research providing clear insights into best practices for pronunciation instruction, there exists relatively little implementation of such practices in pedagogical materials including textbooks. This is particularly true for target languages other than English. With the goal of assisting instructors wishing to build effective evidence-based instructional practices, we outline a set of key principles relevant to pronunciation teaching in general, illustrated here via Spanish in particular, drawing on previous pedagogical research as well as methods and findings from experimental (applied) linguistics. With the overall goal of enabling learners to move toward greater intelligibility, these principles include the importance of perceptual training from the onset of learning, a strong prosodic component, the use of contextualized activities, and a focus on segmental and prosodic phenomena with a high functional load as well as those that are shared across target language varieties. These principles are then illustrated with innovative perception and production exercises for beginner, university-level learners of Spanish. We conclude with a discussion of ways in which the pedagogical principles exposed here can be extended beyond the production of individual activities to the design of a broader pronunciation curriculum.

Buffering – Please Be Patient! Does the Attribution of Pauses to Technical Issues Hamper Learning?

“…However, these findings should not be over-generalized to questioning the suitability of videos for language learning because language learning does not merely comprise the learning of basic vocabulary, which was the scope of the current experiment. In contrast, videos may also be used as authentic learning materials that allow students to listen to native speakers' pronunciation (Villegas Rogers and Medley, 1988;Colantoni et al, 2021). Thus, it may be useful to combine different representational formats in order to grasp the full potential of media for language learning.…”

Acoustic Similarity Predicts Vowel Phoneme Detection in an Unfamiliar Regional Accent: Evidence from Monolinguals, Bilinguals and Second-Language Learners

“…The order of speakers was counterbalanced, yielding 400 unique items: (40 syllable pairs (14 Matching and 26 Mismatching) × 5 speaker combinations (S.Eng1-S.Eng2, S.Eng1-N.Eng1, S.Eng1-N.Eng2, S.Eng2-N.Eng1 and S.Eng2-N.Eng2) × 2 speaker orders). The two auditory syllables were separated by 1000 ms of silence (cf., 1200 ms used by Flege and MacKay 2004), as a relatively long temporal interval is thought to encourage access to learned phonemic categories rather than promote auditory comparisons (Colantoni et al 2021). The 400 items were grouped into three similarity conditions: 80 items (20%) contained instances of syllables produced only in the familiar S.Eng accent (Matching: n = 28; Mismatching: n = 52), 160 (40%) contained one S.Eng syllable and one Similar N.Eng syllable (Matching: n = 56; Mismatching: n = 104) and 160 (40%) contained one S.Eng syllable and one Dissimilar N.Eng syllable (Matching: n = 56; Mismatching: n = 104).…”

The Spanish Computer-Assisted Listening and Speaking Tutor

“…As Flege (2018) has argued, the amount and quality of L2 input is important for acquiring a more native-like pronunciation. Formfocused training using single words, as in CALST, should be followed by practice in which the words are embedded in a larger context (Derwing et al, 1998) learned in more spontaneous, contextualised speech situations (Colantoni et al, 2021). For this reason, CALST exercises should be followed up with communicative practice in language classes.…”