Background
Poetry is a literary genre that makes people fall in love with sounds and words, but perhaps it is also the literary form most difficult to teach. Our children nowadays are not exposed enough to poetry and they perceive it as a complicated way of writing. The main focus for teachers should be to teach the genre in a way that is meaningful and engaging to students.
In the second- language setting, it is important to analyze and practice the sounds in the target language. This will improve the pronunciation, and will help the students acquire more vocabulary by identifying the stem of words from the same family.
The Articulatory System
It is the system of joints in the mouth. It is comprised of three components: the temporomandibular joints, the muscles of mastication, and dental occlusion (the natural contact between the upper and lower teeth). The field of Articulatory Phonetics is a subfield of Phonetics. In studying articulation, phoneticians explain how humans produce speech sounds via the interaction of different physiological structures. Generally Articulatory Phonetics is concerned with the transformation of aerodynamic energy into acoustic energy. Aerodynamic energy refers to the airflow through the vocal tract. Its kinetic form is the actual dynamic airflow. Acoustic energy is variation in the air pressure that can be represented as sound waves, which are then perceived by the human auditory system as sounds. (Antonio Qillis, 1981, Fonetica Acustica de la Lengua Espanola)
In other words, speech production occurred when phonemic information is transformed into continued acoustic events through a sequence of movements of articulatory organs such as the jaw, lips, tongue, velum, and larynx.
The Similarities and Differences between Spanish and English sounds
In consideration of the variation in syntax, semantics, and phonology among languages, it may seem impossible to learn a second language. For some languages of the same family, the similarities far exceed their differences, while in others the differences are commonly present, making it more challenging for the students. Regardless of the similarities or differences between languages, a person's knowledge of his or her native language directly impacts their target language acquisition.
In the case of an English speaker acquiring Spanish, there are many similarities that can be used to transfer information from English to Spanish. English is a Germanic language and Spanish is a Romance language, but they both have Latin in common. The first similarity among both languages is that they utilized the Roman alphabet. Still another is that thirty to forty percent of English words are Spanish cognates, meaning they have a related word in Spanish.
Cognates can be positive, when they have similar meaning, spelling, and pronunciation in both languages. For example, the word "familia" in Spanish is similar to the word "family" in English and they have the same meaning. Other examples are: linguística/linguistics, fantasia/fantasy. But, cognates can also be unreliable, they have similar meaning, spelling, and pronunciation in both languages, but they also have additional meanings in one language that do not apply in the other language. Examples of unreliable cognates are the verbs "asistir" and "atender". Asistir is similar to the English word "to assist", but it can also mean -to attend-. Likewise "atender" is similar to the English word "to attend" that can mean -to take care of-. Other examples of unreliable cognates are historía/history, can also mean story or tale, discusión/ discussion, can be used as argument. Other cognates are completely false, when they have a total different meaning in each language. Example of a false cognate is the word "éxíto" in Spanish means success, and the word "exit" in which means a way out.
Syntactical patterns can be helpful in transferring from English to Spanish and vice versa. Spanish nouns generally end in-ncia and English nouns often end in-nce. Spanish words endingin oso-osa and English words ending in -ous are typically adjectives. Spanish verbs that end in -ificar commonly correspond with English verbs ending in -ify. The English ending -tion generally translates to the Spanish ending -ción.
A major difference between these languages is the formation of the past participle. Spanish past participles most commonly end in "ado" or "ido", while English past participles end in "ed." Although these are the general forms, many irregulars exist in both languages. The most important distinction is that the past participle in Spanish, when used as an adjective, needs to agree in gender and number with the noun that it modifies, where as in English it does not.
There are important similarities and differences between Spanish and English phonemic and phonology. "Phonics," to a Spanish speaker, refers to a letter-to-sound correspondence, but to an English speaker it refers to "patterns of letters that yield certain sounds" ("Similarities and Differences....."). Even though both languages have five written vowels, Spanish has five corresponding vowel sounds, while English has more than fourteen vowel sounds. In Spanish "sounding out words" means separating words by syllables. In contrast, in English "sounding out words" involves pronouncing individual sounds and then blending them together. One important difference between the two languages is the existence of English sounds that do not occur in Spanish. Example ou, ow, eigh, th, wh, sl, spr, ng, gh. Also, in Spanish there is no distinction between "V" and "B." Learning Spanish can be challenging for an English speaker, but knowing the similarities and differences between these languages can help with the process of language acquisition.(Eva Mendez,2005, Fundamentos de Fonologia y Fonetica Espanola para Hablantes de Ingles)
Classification of Sounds
Sound is one of the most important senses in humans. It helps us gather information about our environment. The sounds around us have been classified as non-speech sounds, when the sounds can't be conveyed into spoken words. These are the sounds that surround us, like a bird chirping or a car speeding on the street. If we put those sounds together, we are not going to be able to produce words. Others are speech sounds. These are the sounds given to letters; when we combine them they form words that we use in our speech. The last form of sounds is music, which is the art of arranging sounds in time, organized melodically, harmonically and rhythmically.
The Differences Between Letters and Sounds
Sounds can be produced by speaking or they can be heard when it is a non-speech sound. It is very important to understand that we use letters to convey sounds. In order to learn to read we must differentiate one letter from another and to attach the right sound to each letter. For skilled reading to develop, we must learn to do this without errors and without thinking about it. We need two capabilities that facilitate reading acquisition:
- Alphabetic Principle, which is the realization that there is a relationship between the sounds that make up spoken words, and the sounds that letters make.
- Phonological awareness, which involves the development of the ability to decompose spoken words into constituent sounds and then manipulate those sounds.
Learning the sounds of letters is a very important part of learning to read and to spell. Letters are classified as consonants and vowels, and we use the combination of both to produce meaningful sounds, speech sounds. Learning the sounds that letters symbolize in words is an important foundation of literacy. With this knowledge students can decode printed words, and construct the spelling of words in their spoken vocabulary. This helps students identify patterns in words (word families), how changing the first letter of a word changes the word and meaning, and patterns in phrases (a group of words that repeat in a constant pattern). This leads to the realization that written words can be used to represent speech. ( Francisco Gaona, 1949, Algunas Consideraciones sobre la Ensenanza de los Sonidos de la Lengua Espanola.)
The Sound System of Spanish and its' Variation across the World
Spanish is a language whose phonemic pronunciation is easy to learn. As in English, the alphabet used is the Roman alphabet with an addition of four consonants: Ch (Chosa), Ll (Luvía), Ñ (Niña), and Rr (Carro), as well as five vowels (a,e,i,o,u). Each consonant has a sound attached to it and each vowel also has only one sound to go with it. Spanish words are formed by syllables, where each syllable represents a phoneme. In Spanish words, only one syllable per word is stressed; usually it is the one before last. This makes the intonation in Spanish highly regular, easy to read and melodic when reading poetry. (Eugenio Martinez Celdran, Ana M. Fernandez Planas, Manual de Fonetica Espanola: Articulaciones y sonidos de Espanol.)
Spanish is spoken in twenty- one different countries around the world. More than four hundred million people speak the language that was originated in northern Spain. Each region and each country where Spanish is spoken has its own mixture with the regional cultural languages. That has caused variations in the pronunciation of words and speaking accents. That is also true in the choice of vocabulary, where in different areas the same object is named differently. For example a banana in the Dominican Republic is called "guineo" while in Mexico it is called "plátano" and in Venezuela "camburo." The reason for the differences in names for the fruit is because in Dominican Republic the word "guineo" comes from the Taino language of the indigenous population of the island over five hundred years ago. In Mexico the word "plátano" comes from the original Spanish language, and the word "camburo" in Venezuela comes from the Arawak language of the natives who populated that country for more than seven hundred years.
In occasions the same word can also be pronounced differently from country to country (Puerto Rico and Costa Rica for example), from continent to continent (Europe and South America), and from region to region (coast and mountains). For example in Puerto Rico the word mango is pronounced with an accent over the last vowel (o), while in Costa Rica the accent is placed over the first vowel (a). In Spain the word zapatos (shoes) is pronounced with the z sound similar to the Th in English, while in South America z is pronounced like s in English. In the mountains of the Dominican Republic the word sol (sun) is pronounced soi (instead of the L sound at the end of the word, they have a Spanish i sound), while in the coastal area is pronounced sol (keeping the L sound at the end of the word.)
As vast as the Spanish language is, the real richness of it is in the culture of each country where the language is spoken. Latin America shares a common basic culture, inherited from our Spanish roots, but each country has its own mix of races and cultures, from the natives found at the time of the discovery, the Africans brought later on in our history, to the immigration of Asians and Europeans in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. These factors make each culture unique, but tied like roots to the trunk of an old tree.
With this unit I intent to teach my English speaking students sounds, pronunciation, and intonation, as well as cultural similarities and differences, using poems from various Latin American authors. Jorge Luis Borges, Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Nicolas Guillén, Gabriela Mistral, Rúben Darío, and Rosario Castellanos are some of the authors that will help me to accomplish the main purpose of the unit, which is to enrich the student lives' through their second language learning process. It is my hope and wish that teachers and students all over the world embrace the Spanish language and culture, with the same love that I have felt developing the unit.
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