Articulatory Phonetics in the First‐Year Spanish Classroom

Abstract

focus of this article is twofold: I reconsider the general question of the role of articulatory phonetics in the second language (L2) classroom and review the phonetics presentation in 10 recent first‐year Spanish texts. Pronunciation has been accorded little importance within recent methodological approaches, although their stated goals of communication and intelligibility in fact require the incorporation of explicit phonetics instruction in the language classroom. Considering the first‐year Spanish L2 classroom, I propose a phonetics program based on the notion of a learner's dialect (cf. Bergen, 1974). I then measure the phonetics presentation of 10 Spanish textbooks against a learner's dialect, and find that pronunciation sections are in most cases incomplete and inaccurate and provide for no self‐monitoring or recycling. This article argues against the current trend reflected in these texts, which relegates pronunciation to the laboratory manual or eliminates it altogether.