The sounds of Spanish: An introduction to Spanish phonetics and pronunciation

Elective Course

The main objective of this course is to help students improve their oral skills by reflecting on the phonetic and phonological particularities of Spanish while practicing the language in context. The practice of pronunciation will be carried out through a variety of contextualized activities that will stimulate perceptive, productive and interactive skills. Such activities will be divided into two categories: individual work and in-class interaction. The individual work focuses on perception (from distinguishing phonological pairs to identifying intonation patterns in real pieces of speech) and individual production (in the form of podcasts) to help each student identify his/her personal difficulties dealing with the pronunciation of Spanish. In-class activities focus on group readings, role plays and oral communication in relation to the course content. The course will offer an insight into the linguistic variations of colloquial speech and dialectology. Besides the linguistic and theoretical nature of the discipline, The Sounds of Spanish is structured around lexical, grammatical and cultural themes adequate to the student’s level of Spanish as to contextualize the practice of pronunciation. This is mainly a practical course and no previous knowledge of Linguistics is required. Teaching materials and medium of instruction will be Spanish.