My Spanish 3 Honors students can conjugate 21 tenses in any given form on command. They can analyze and discuss the similarities and differences between Jorge Luis Borges’ short story and Salvador Dali’s surrealist paintings through the theme of duality of being and metafiction. My Spanish 3 Honors students can discuss the benefits and moral disadvantages of stem-cell research and technology in the medical field. They can recite the Beatitudes, discuss genocide in Guatemala, all in Spanish…HOWEVER: 

Many of them do it in an inauthentic accent that makes me weep bitterly at night…(okay that’s not true, but the accents definitely need some work…)

I have struggled for YEARS to find techniques to keep my brilliant students accountable for having an authentic accent. Their accent must match their genius minds. When I correct them in class, and they repeat after me, they are able to sound authentic and within a few minutes, they revert back to overcompensating with an “Americanized” accent (Imagine Dr. Phil speaking Spanish…)

You’re welcome.

While I understand that speaking Spanish with an authentic accent isn’t imperative to understanding the general gist of what a person is saying, and I also recognize and appreciate the fact that not everyone is capable of sounding like they jumped out of a Spanish telenovela, I do find it to be important to at least make an attempt to the best of one’s ability to produce a sound that is as similar as possible to the target language (in this case, Spanish). To make this blog not such a long read, I’ll get to the point…

I wanted to find a fun, out of the box tool that would help my Honors students become cognizant of their accents and to hold them accountable for trying to sound as authentic as possible. I wanted to provide them with a tool that they could use to practice at home. I introduce you to:

It’s a game where people try to pronounce certain words with a plastic barrier in their mouths. (Apparently it’s hilarious, I’ve never played…) Anyway, I came up with this idea because many English vowels require the speaker to close their mouths to pronounce. For example: “oh” or “u” (you). If you just tried saying these vowels, you find that your lips close together. My students are saying words like “dos” and “ocho” like “dose” and “ohchoh”. In Spanish, the mouth stays open. It’s hard to explain in writing, but the plastic tool prevents students from closing their mouths, thus forcing them to pronounce the vowels in a more authentic way. Here are some videos, first in English, then Spanish:

I asked my students what they thought about this new technique to help them with their accents, some said that they liked it and they could feel that the plastic piece was helping them be aware of the positioning of their lips when they spoke. Others said that it didn’t really help. Perhaps they won’t go home and practice with their own tools that I provided to them, but there was an even more valuable lesson that came up with using this ridiculous piece of plastic. It was ridiculous. I have found over the years that in order to be successful at speaking a language, one must take risks. The mental filter that tells you that you sound dumb, or are going to sound ridiculous impedes many language learners from actually attempting to speak. The biggest lesson for my students was to eliminate the filter, to both look and feel ridiculous, and attempt to speak anyway. Did this piece of plastic help them improve their accents dramatically? Perhaps not, but it certainly made them more cognizant of their accent, and it was a physical reminder to let go of the filter and just try to sound the best that they can. This is not what I had planned to happen with this activity. I was more focused on getting my students to sound more authentic, but an even better result came from the class: My students were having fun, they lost their obtrusive filters, and began to let go of the fear of speaking (and singing).