Key Issues in the Teaching of Spanish Pronunciation: From Description to Pedagogy ed. by Rajiv Rao

Abstract

Reviewed by: Key Issues in the Teaching of Spanish Pronunciation: From Description to Pedagogy ed. by Rajiv Rao André Zampaulo Rao, Rajiv, editor. Key Issues in the Teaching of Spanish Pronunciation: From Description to Pedagogy. Routledge, 2019. Pp. 355. ISBN 978-1-13895-461-8. Considering the lack of priority that the teaching of pronunciation receives in Spanish language textbooks, Key Issues in the Teaching of Spanish Pronunciation: From Description to Pedagogy is a long-awaited collection of fifteen essays cohesively organized into two parts, the first of which is dedicated to the sound system of Spanish, while the second delves into particular challenges that arise in the classroom. By providing readers with the necessary depth that the subject requires, the editor and the twenty-one leading scholars who pen the book chapters not only offer their expertise on virtually all aspects related to the sounds of Spanish, but also provide hands-on activities and suggestions for instructors and students alike. In the book’s introduction, the editor contextualizes the motivation for a new resource dedicated solely to the instruction of Spanish pronunciation and provides readers with a well-organized and explained section on phonetics jargon and terminology, complementary to the glossary located at the end of the book. Part I gathers eight chapters that fully describe the Spanish sound system and offer practical strategies to teaching it in the classroom. Eugenio Martínez Celdrán and Wendy Elvira-García provide the first chapter, “Description of Spanish Vowels and Guidelines for Teaching Them,” which addresses the phonetic and phonological features of Spanish vowels and provides a collection of exercises on the perception and production of these segments by learners of different first-language backgrounds. The second and third chapters are devoted to stop consonants. Specifically, Mary L. Zampini’s “Pronunciation in the L2 Spanish Classroom: The Voiceless Stops /p, t, k/” and Manuela González-Bueno’s “Suggestions for Teaching Spanish Voiced Stops /b, d, ɡ/ and Their Lenited Allophones [β̞, ð̞, ɣ̞]” provide a full and illustrative description of the phonetics and phonology of Spanish stops and the challenges that their articulation and allophonic distribution pose to native English-speaking learners of Spanish. The pedagogical materials and guided activities offered at the end of both chapters depict the authors’ viewpoint successfully and guide the reader into putting their approaches into practice. Next, the phonological rules and allophonic distribution of Spanish interdental, alveolar, and velar phonemes are carefully laid out and illustrated in A. Raymond Elliott’s “A Theoretical Framework in the Acquisition and Teaching of Fricatives to L2 Learners of Spanish.” Benjamin Schmeiser’s “Issues in the Teaching of Spanish Liquid Consonants” correctly describes the articulatory, acoustic, and auditory features of lateral and rhotic consonants in Spanish [End Page 300] and identifies the production of velarized /l/ as one of the common issues found in the speech of native English-speaking learners of Spanish. As for rhotics, the author offers appropriate tongue-twisters to be used in the classroom and discusses similarities between the production of these consonants in Spanish and English. Carlos-Eduardo Piñeros focuses on Spanish nasal consonants in “The Polymorphism of Spanish Nasal Stops.” Besides discussing the articulatory characteristics of these segments and the contrast in meaning they produce in Spanish, Piñeros also provides a thorough account of the behavior of nasals at the end of syllables. Chapters seven and eight are devoted to describing Spanish suprasegmentals and stressing the crucial role they play in the teaching and learning of Spanish pronunciation. While Sonia Colina’s “Incorporating Syllable Structure into the Teaching of Spanish Pronunciation” provides a singularly rich sample of activities featuring communicative exercises, tongue-twisters, cognates, and borrowings, Carme de-la-Mota’s “Improving Non-Native Pronunciation: Teaching Prosody to Learners of Spanish as a Second/Foreign Language” offers innovative approaches to incorporate stress, rhythm, and intonation into the practice of pronunciation. The seven chapters featured in the second part of the book focus on the various pedagogical challenges posed by the teaching of Spanish pronunciation and provide practical suggestions to overcome them in the classroom. For example, Germán Zárate-Sández’s “Spanish Pronunciation and the Teaching of Dialectal Variation” deals with...