Sonidos en contexto: Una introducción a la fonética del español con especial referencia a la vida real (review)

In an era of second/foreign language instruction that has seen an almost complete abandonment of the formal teaching of pronunciation, it is very gratifying to happen across a textbook specifically and carefully designed to teach the sound system of Spanish to intermediate and/or advanced university students. Sonidos en contexto is an excellent, time-saving resource for busy Spanish faculty trained in descriptive linguistics to create a turn-key course in Spanish pronunciation.

This textbook takes important steps towards making the teaching of phonetics/phonology to undergraduate students more palatable. Very few students seem to be content with the traditional, description-driven approach to teaching this topic, finding it repetitive and dull. This textbook takes a much more hands-on approach designed to offer both findings from descriptive linguistics as well as a series of multimodal activities which encourage students to actually improve their pronunciation. It is not easy to take a subject as dry as an exhaustive study of the sound system of Spanish and make it applicable and interesting to undergraduate students, but this book accomplishes the task beautifully.

This textbook is 433 pages long with 387 pages of primary reading materials divided into 26 chapters. Students would therefore read an average of 30 pages per week with almost two full weeks left for exams and/or supplementary materials. Each chapter, with the possible exception of chapter 4 ("Spanish word stress"), is short enough to be read and discussed in a single 75-minute period.

The conceptual flow of this book is very ordered and logical, starting with the Spanish writing system, then moving on to syllabification and word stress before discussing the basic concepts of phonetics and phonology (i.e., "What is a phoneme? An allophone?", etc.). The bulk of the book (chapters 6-24) is dedicated to an in-depth analysis of the vowels and consonants of Spanish, while the last chapter offers a short discussion on the major dialectal divisions of the Spanish-speaking world, a topic of perennial interest to students. Not all such textbooks are laid out this way, but in this particular case, it makes a great deal of sense to start with the writing system: many Spanish students are taught that "Spanish is spelled the same way every time" and although this pedagogical falsehood is very useful at beginning levels of instruction, it can lead students to believe that Spanish is completely phonetic. Removing this misconception while drawing attention to the differences between the writing and sound systems of Spanish is an excellent way to start this type of study.

Sonidos en contexto offers a thorough and complete descriptive analysis of the Spanish sound system, including transcribed readings, ordinary readings for phonetic transcription, articulatory phonetic description, phonological distributions, and phonology problems. However, what really sets this textbook apart are its wealth of practice activities, strategically placed within the text to allow students to practice the content covered in each chapter.

The first of these activities, Repetición rápida, provides students with lists of Spanish words for rapid pronunciation and sight recognition practice. Aplicación activities offer a more traditional "memorize and regurgitate" style of practice, asking students to demonstrate their comprehension of each concept. Veo veo activities provide students with drawings/pictures containing images corresponding to words containing different targeted sounds, and asks them to pronounce these words as they recall from memory the words associated with each image. Cultura lingüística activities draw parallels between the Spanish sound system and popular Hispanic culture, focusing specifically on how this sound system has brought different cultural phenomena into being. Muestra musical activities include Hispanic musical selections which contain sounds targeted by each chapter. These recordings can be found both on the included CD and on the textbook's companion website at Yale University Press. Most often, students are encouraged to...