ABSTRACT
This chapter first describes heritage speakers in general, providing information about how they acquired the Spanish language and how this exposure might help shape their phonetic/phonological system. It then provides a brief description of current research on the production and perception of Spanish sounds by heritage speakers, followed by some observations of pronunciation the authors themselves have encountered in their own classrooms. Based on previous studies and observations, the activities and suggestions for teachers at the end of the chapter target practicing the grapheme-to-phoneme mapping of <b> and <v>, stress placement, resyllabification and linking across word boundaries, and the use of acoustic analysis to point out differences between Spanish and English. Finally, the authors offer ideas for two possible student projects that can help heritage speakers gain an increased appreciation for their unique variety of Spanish.
