Teaching Spanish pronunciation

Welcome to this free course on Teaching Spanish pronunciation.This short course is aimed at teachers of Spanish working in the United Kingdom who wish to extend their theoretical knowledge on teaching Spanish pronunciation. It offers ideas and practical skills that can be used in the classroom, be that virtual or face-to-face. The course explores intelligibility, fluency, foreign accent, language variation, articulation and acoustics. It is suitable for all levels of linguistic competence and all levels of education. The course is divided into 5 weeks.

• Week1Week 1 Why teach pronunciation?
• Introduction
• 1 Why teach pronunciation?
• 1.1. Reasons for teaching pronunciation
• Speaking with an accent 
• 1.2 What pronunciation to teach?
• 2 Vowels
• 3 Consonants
• 3.1 Place of articulation
• Voiced or voiceless?
• International Phonetic Alphabet
• 4 Week 1 summary
• Acknowledgements
• Week2Week 2 The building blocks to pronunciation
• Introduction
• 1 Orthography and pronunciation
• 1.1 Phonetics and Phonology
• 1.2 Contrastive segments
• 2 Pronunciation and context
• 3 Phonotactic constraints
• 3.1 Syllable
• 3.2 English syllable
• 3.3 Spanish syllable
• 4 Barriers to pronunciation
• 5 The role of affect
• 6 Reducing levels of FLA
• 7 The verbo-tonal method
• 8 Week 2 summary
• Acknowledgements
• Week3Week 3 Stress, rhythm and intonation
• Introduction
• 1 What is stress?
• 2 Comparing stress in Spanish and English
• 3 What is rhythm?
• 4 What is intonation?
• 4.1 Basic intonation patterns in Spanish
• 4.2 Interrogative sentences
• 5 Contrasting Spanish and English: placement of nuclear stress
• 5.1 Repeated information
• 5.2 Indefinite objects
• 5.3 Intransitive sentences
• 5.4 Contrastive focus
• 6 Week 3 summary
• Acknowledgements
• Week4Week 4 Spanish and English vowels contrasted
• Introduction
• 1 Spanish and English vowel spaces
• 2 Spanish vowels one-by-one
• 3 Diphthongs and triphthongs
• 4 Connected speech phenomena
• 5 Week 4 summary
• Acknowledgements
• Week5Week 5 Spanish and English consonants contrasted
• Introduction
• 1 Stops (oclusivas)
• 1.1 What is aspiration?
• 1.2 Voicing in /b d g/
• 1.3 Word-final stops
• 1.4 Spanish stops
• 2 Fricatives (fricativas)
• 2.1 Sibilants
• 2.2 The voiced fricative
• 2.3 The affricate
• 2.4 Spanish fricatives
• 3 Nasal (nasales)
• 3.1 Nasal assimilation
• 4 Liquids (líquidas)
• 5 Rhotics (vibrantes)
• 5.1 Tap or trill?
• 6 Practising the verbo-tonal method
• 7 End-of-course summary
• Take the next step
• Acknowledgements