January 27th, 2022 (13:30 - 15:00 Boston / 19:30-21:00 Lyon & Madrid)
Online via Zoom | RSVP: https://bit.ly/RSVP-Observatorio or info-observatory@fas.harvard.edu
Encuentros transatlánticos en torno al español: "La enseñanza de la pronunciación en el aula de ELE" with Juana Gil Fernández and Jorge Méndez Seijas
This is the second in a series of conversations about the current state of Spanish in the US and in Europe, organized by the Institutos Cervantes of Lyon and Harvard. This session will examine the critical role of effective pronunciation in the encoding and decoding of oral messages, an especially critical fact when communication occurs in a language one is learning. Despite its importance, the teaching of pronunciation is normally relegated to the background; thus, during this event, two hispanists from each side of the Atlantic, Juana Gil Fernández and Jorge Méndez Seijas, will discuss the potential and relevance pronunciation has in the Spanish as a Second or Foreign Language classroom and will present various teaching practices that can be used in a variety of academic contexts.
Gil Fernández is the current Director of the Instituto Cervantes in Lyon, France. With a PhD in Hispanic Philology, her areas of specialization include the phonetics-phonology relationship and various applications of phonetics, such as forensic phonetics and the teaching of pronunciation. Among her publications, and relevant to this session, is her book Fonética para profesores de español: de la teoría a la práctica (Arco/Libros, 2007).She headed the Phonetics Laboratory at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid, where she designed the Postgraduate Program in Phonic Studies and founded Loquens. Spanish Journal of Speech Sciences. Méndez Seijas is a Preceptor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. His areas of specialization are Spanish second-language acquisition, Hispanic linguistics, curriculum design, and phonetics and phonology. He has been a professor of Spanish at Princeton University, Georgetown University, and the University of Rhode Island, where he developed several curriculum design projects for students of Spanish as a second or heritage language.
Language: Spanish