Chapter 9

Enfoque Oral y didáctica de la pronunciación del español

El objetivo principal de este capítulo es reflexionar sobre los planteamientos conceptuales y metodológicos de una didáctica de la pronunciación basada en un enfoque oral. Nos referimos a enfoque oral cuando hablamos de metodologías en didáctica de la pronunciación que son plenamente coherentes con el enfoque comunicativo y siguen tres principios fundamentales: la lengua oral se trabaja desde la propia oralidad; la pronunciación se entiende y se trata como lengua oral, y el aula de instrucción formal se convierte en un contexto significativo. Así, partiendo de una didáctica de la pronunciación basada en un enfoque oral, en este capítulo argumentamos los principios y fundamentos de este enfoque, presentamos una revisión de los estudios e investigaciones que se han realizado en esta área y, finalmente, ofrecemos posibles aplicaciones y recomendaciones didácticas para el aula de español.

Teaching pronunciation occupies a central place in the field of teaching and learning oral skills in a foreign language. It is hard to argue against the statement that ‘pronunciation is everywhere’ (Darcy 2018, p. 14). Its scope in terms of methodological approaches and classroom practices has been evolving considerably in recent years, in the field of language teaching (Brinton, 2017; Gao & Hanna, 2016) and also in the specific area of teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL) (Gil, 2012; Iruela, 2007; Silverio-Pérez, 2014; Padilla, 2015). Given the easy access to technology, devices to use in the classroom or beyond the classroom, as well as multiple opportunities to engage with native speakers on-line, the main advances in teaching and learning pronunciation have been steady and growing in importance. Despite the rising number of methodological innovations and studies in this area, there are still few pedagogical practices that are based entirely on orality and remain mediated by the written language (Derwing & Munro, 2015); for example, all the activities proposed in textbooks that teachers use with students in the language class. Equally, within the current teaching and learning context, it may be argued that it is difficult to situate the teaching of pronunciation and its aligned pedagogies completely into communicative practices and processes that occur in the classroom (Levis, 2018). Thus, in this chapter we aim to raise a discussion about the main methodological and pedagogical issues related to teaching pronunciation in the SFL classroom in order to highlight and propose a more direct oral approach. A review of recent studies in teaching pronunciation in the area of SFL will be carried out, giving special attention to oral approach practices and research results (Cantero & Giralt, 2020) when applying this pedagogical approach. Finally, we will conclude the chapter with some recommendations and offer some teaching suggestions for including a more oral-based approach in the Spanish classroom.