Teaching Spanish Pronunciation

Pronunciation is active not only when speaking aloud, but when reading, listening, writing or even remembering events or numbers. It also has a strong impact on language learners’ self-esteem. In the field of Spanish language teaching, however, the persistence of certain myths related to the teaching of pronunciation has contributed to this feature not receiving much attention. The aims of the present project are to identify Spanish tutors’ professional development needs in the area of pronunciation teaching through the evaluation of an open educational resource, a five-week course on teaching Spanish pronunciation and as a result, adjust our syllabi to systematically incorporate pronunciation teaching into our modules.

Recently, I have lead the development of a 15-hour open course on OpenLearn Create (as part of the AHRC funded project Language Acts and Worldmaking, Diasporic Identities strand) which aims at teachers of Spanish working in the United Kingdom who wish to extend their theoretical knowledge of teaching Spanish pronunciation, offering ideas and practical skills that can be used in the classroom.  

As part of the present project two ALs would be contracted to provide critical comments on this open course. They will do the course and identify the relevancy of topics, parts that need more explanation, more examples or missing content. As they are members of the target audience, their input is an essential part of piloting and then amending the course. This spring, I administered a small-scale questionnaire to tutors on L194 in order to find out their attitude and beliefs towards teaching pronunciation as well as the challenges they face and the best practice they can identify. The semi-structured interviews that I will design and conduct with the ALs are a logical follow-up of the questionnaire to gain an in-depth understanding into the challenges and best practice in teaching pronunciation and to clarify the why and how of the survey answers (Adams 2015). The interviews will be recorded, transcribed using automatic speech recognition, and a thematic analysis will be carried out to determine the relevant topics that are meaningful for identifying Spanish tutors’ professional development needs for teaching pronunciation at distance and ways of integrating this teaching into our new modules.  

Thus, data form the semi-structured interviews can also serve as a starting point for a later bid to expand the mentioned Open Educational Resource. I will present the results at LAL research or teaching forum and AL conferences as well as the PRAXIS festival of scholarship. Apart from the report I will submit a short article into the European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning.