Didáctica de la prosodia en ELSE: desafíos y estrategias

Abstract

In this paper we will address the issue of how to teach pronunciation in the ELSE (Spanish as Foreign or Second Language) classroom and, more specifically, the challenge of how to teach prosody, a crucial component on which communication is largely dependent but which still constitutes a pending issue when working on the phonic competence of the students. In fact, even if in general terms pronunciation has a marginal place in the resources used in language teaching, when the issue is tackled, segmental features (and their relationship with the graphemes) are usually given more prominence than prosodic features, which are generally more often associated with the so-called “fluency” (especially in reference to the speed of the speech and the use of pauses) than with the actual pronunciation (Sánchez Avendaño, 2002; Pacagnini, 2015, 2016, 2017a). Accordingly, in this article we will rediscuss strategies (Pacagnini, 2013, 2017b) to approach the teaching of pronunciation in the ELSE classroom focusing on the prosodic features but without losing sight of the interaction with other levels of linguistic description (such as syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse).