Reflections

 Fabiola Ruiz

     Pronunciation errors are part of the learning process, without doing errors, students don't know if they are progressing. As a native Spanish speaker, I consider that one of the biggest challenges when learning English is pronunciation because we have a big influence of the mother tongue, and we tend to pronounce some Spanish sounds in English. Moreover, is important to detect those errors because if we make them in a conversation with someone, the message that we are trying to say, will not be clear. It's fundamental to practice as much as we can, to avoid doing pronunciation errors, and with this assignment, I found useful exercises that I can do to practice my pronunciation and that I will do with my students as a future English teacher. Furthermore, designing the exercises was a nice experience because I did them as the role of a teacher, I used my creativity to design dynamic and interactive exercises. 

      When I was looking for the most common errors of pronunciation that Spanish speakers make in English, I observed mispronunciation of consonants, replacing consonants with others, sentence stress, and dropping consonant sounds at the end of words are the result that in Spanish there's a tendency to pronounce things the way that they're written, but in English is not the same, words are written and pronounced differently. In addition, I didn't find any difficulty to identify the errors because I identified certain mistakes that I make and I am working on them to improve. However, making the exercises was so challenging and difficult because I thought as a teacher of what kind of exercises I can make to help my students avoid those errors, and I take a lot of time to choose the most useful exercises. 

     This project helped me to discover my pronunciation errors, to know about them, and some techniques to avoid making them. I really enjoyed doing this blog because I used creativity to put the correct information and exercises that people can practice every day. Besides, I learned to put clear instructions in the exercises, I was very specific so that people understand how to perform them correctly. To sum up, it's important to emphasize that identifying errors is essential to start work on them, as a future English teacher, my students will imitate my pronunciation, so I have to be a model for them, and teach them not to have a perfect pronunciation like a native, but have an understandable pronunciation. I will encourage my students to practice with exercises and funny activities, but I will teach them to be autonomous because they must learn to self-correct and evaluate their progress. 

Sayda Mendoza.

     In this Project, I must say that it was not easy since it is a job that needs a lot of dedication, but the most important thing is that I was able to detect errors that I made, but in this way, I designed pronunciation exercises to help students avoid those same pronunciation problems. Some of the problems I found is that beginners are the ones who make the most mistakes, but it is normal, they confuse the letter /s/ with /z/, the /v/ consonant is pronounced like a /b/  etc. I really had a lot of difficulties finding these errors, and designing the exercises was an homeworks since I did not know how to put them on a sheet of paper so that the students could understand them. 
 So, the strengths of this project were creativity and learning because by creating each exercises I learned different teaching strategies without hesitation. I loved this project. I could describe the many things that I learned in the identification of pronunciation errors, first I must say that it is an essential topic that has the main objective which is to help correct pronunciation errors when we learn a second language, also through these errors, the teacher has the duty to correct the student at an early age so that in the future such errors are not continued. I plan to use this experience in the future as a shield so that when I communicate with others, the listeners do not have difficulty deciphering the message I am transmitting, and as a teacher, I would like to use this experience to help my students by teaching them good pronunciation and developing different strategies that improve the skills of each student. I would like to suggest to my classmates that they design didactic materials that help with the contribution of better pronunciation from the moment they start to learn a second acquisition language, in short words this project was a good experience for me.