Final recording

This is my final recording, and I’ve tried to focus on all areas of pronunciation that I have worked on – I find that is the hardest thing, putting it all together, and it takes a lot of practice.

Looking back, I feel that the most useful for me has been the practice of reading out loud, ideally with the assistance of a native speaker or an expert. Simply recording myself and comparing doesn’t work as well, as my ear is not sensitive enough to catch all my mistakes. Another thing that helped was simply to use the archetype, stopping after each sentence, and repeating it several times. Also, reading about the features of the sounds definitely increased my understanding of the sounds that I should be producing – the implication for me as a teacher would be the importance of teaching learners a little phonology theory when we practice pronunciation.

I feel that I have improved in my pronunciation of the soft and hard “r”, the vowels, /θ/, and /b/. I’m still not confident about the /x/, and that is an area I still need to work on. I have practiced it by taking lots of words that have it and repeating them over and over again, and during a practice session it definitely improves (and I think it’s much better in this recording!). Also, I get a sore throat after a practice session… true story.

It was interesting to go through this process and see the deliberate pronunciation practice from the perspective of the learner. In the past I mostly replied on imitation – more conscious and purposeful, in the case of English, and more superficial in the case of other languages; but in both cases it was random and without method or any focused exercises.

Recording 8

Recording 7 – the fun one!

While practicing I noticed that it helps to overdo it a bit – so I decided to make one recording with theatrical oomph. It doesn’t sound like her, but it was fun to do and helped me relax!

Recording 7

Recording 6: Intonation

For this recording I decided to mark the intonation on the transcript and try to imitate it.

One thing that I noticed was that stress is produced mainly thorugh syllable length and volume, not so much through pitch. There are a few places where pitch is more pronounced (underlined and highlighted in yellow) but it's still less so than in English. Even though I practiced many times, when I listened to the recording I realized I still make the pitch higher than it should be.

Another difference from English is that it's much more flat overall. There are long stretches where the pitch stays the same, usually on the low side. This was also quite difficult to accomplish but I think I managed to do so in most places.

Recording 6

Recording 5: rate and connected speech

This time I tried to speak faster and imitate Elena's speech rate and thought groups. I practiced several times listening to each sentence and repeating. I think I did pretty well in speed but I lost in accuracy - forgot some of the /θ/s and my /x/ was worse than before.

Recording 5

Recording 4: intonation

For this recording I tried to focus on intonation - Spaniards tend to speak with a very low pitch, which I find very interesting but quite difficult to imitate. I think I managed to make it lower than usual but I feel my speech sounds quite unnatural.

Recording 4

Recording 3: /d/

Ohh I haven't posted a recording a long time... need to catch up!

In this one, on top of the previous features, I tried to focus on the intervocalic or final /d/, which is close to the English /ð/ - for example both d's in "necesidad". I thought I managed to do it quite well most of the time, but after listening to it, I see that many times I still revert to the alveolar /d/.

I also tried to produce the approximant /b/, for example in "vivir".

What I'm still really bad at is the alveolar tap [ɾ] for the soft "r". More practice!

Recording 3

Recording 2

The /θ/ is getting better, and I think I manage to do the /x/ most of the time, but it hurts!

Recording 2