Difficulties Spanish speakers have......

[mischa]

Hello, i am a student on an introduction course to TEFL and i am currently working on an assignment which is proving to be difficult, and I'm wodering if anyone could help!

Basically the assignment is Why is the teaching of pronunciation important and the difficulties spanish speakers may have with pronunciation in english.

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Thankyou.

[BobK]

Three general points spring to mind:

• Ease of mapping from writing to sounds in Spanish. Spanish learners try to pronounce every letter, because that is infallibly right in Spanish. (It's interesting - and perhaps relevant - that when I was at a teachers' training session about dyslexia, one teacher reported that she had had a Spanish student [an adult] who had been successfully through the Spanish education system without having his dyslexia diagnosed .)
  
• L1:L2 phonemes almost all (?maybe all) don't match.
  
• Timing. See Timing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Good luck.

b

PS: I've said a bit more about this here.

[BobK]

One other thing: consonant clusters. English uses lots, while Spanish breaks them up with vowel sounds so the there are usually at most two consonants together in a single syllable. For example, English 'strange' has the cognate word estraño; whereas English is happy to start a syllable with three consonant phonemes, Spanish ensures that there are only two each in 'es-' and '-tra-'.

This makes for much L1/L2 interference. I had a student once who said (informally - the choice of words was fine) 'it's crap'; I had difficulty understanding her at first because she inserted a schwa between the words.

b