PronPack 5: Pronunciation of English for Spanish Speakers

PronPack 5: Pronunciation of English for Spanish Speakers provides materials for 18 lessons focusing on common difficulties faced by Spanish-speaking learners. It contains printable worksheets and teacher’s notes, plus audio files on a support website. The lessons attract learners’ attention with memorable activities including raps, games and puzzles.

The lessons focus on pronunciation features from individual sounds to syllables, word stress and sentence stress. Some lessons focus on important distinctions such as the difference between berry and very. Others focus on grammatical endings such as –ed and –s. There is attention to consonant clusters, both at the beginning and the ends of words. Word stress of English and Spanish is compared in words that both languages share such as elephant / elefante. The English use of contrastive stress is compared to the Spanish alternative of word order changes.

Most lessons include two distinct activities on the same topic, for example a rap followed by a communication game or puzzle. The presentation is fun and original, helping to engage learners in what can often be a daunting area of language learning. The material can be used flexibly. The worksheets may be photocopied, or printed from the PDF files which are provided on the website. Alternatively, these files may be projected onto a whiteboard or screen-shared during an online lesson. There are also audio files for most lessons. These can either be used in class, or just to help in preparation, for those teachers who prefer to model the pronunciation themselves in class. Each lesson will typically take around 20-30 minutes of class time, although this can vary a lot depending on how thoroughly you exploit the material.

The teacher’s notes include instructions for presenting and carrying out the activities in class, as well as detailed notes on the pronunciation focus, including a comparison of English and Spanish.

The book is based on the principle that the most important reason to teach pronunciation is to help your students understand and be understood. For this reason, the lessons in this book focus on pronunciation issues which are most likely to affect intelligibility. The objective is not for learners to sound like native speakers of any specific variety of English, but to be better communicators in a world where English is a global Lingua Franca.