This paper describes the prosodic characteristics of emphasis found in utterances by various Chinese students of Spanish as an FL in the expression of emotions, comparing them with different emphatic patterns described for Peninsula Spanish and identifying their communicative efficiency in order to develop educational proposals for improving their competence.
One of the most obvious difficulties for Chinese people speaking Spanish as an FL, is pronunciation (sounds and above all prosody), an aspect that can lead to many misunderstandings in conversations with native speakers. Particularly relevant among these misunderstandings is the lack of expressiveness when speaking; as if they have difficulties expressing or were incapable of communicating their emotions.
This paper describes the prosodic characteristics of emphasis found in utterances by various Chinese students of Spanish as an FL in the expression of emotions, comparing them with different emphatic patterns described for Peninsula Spanish (Cantero & Font-Rochés, 2007, Moenia, vol. 13) and identifying their communicative efficiency in order to develop educational proposals for improving their competence.
The corpus for the research comprises 60 utterances by 6 men and 13 women between the ages of 19 and 24, with an A2-B1 language level. They are all studying Spanish Philology in their country of origin and as part of their studies completed a university extension course (25cr) at the Universitat de Barcelona (2018-2019) on teaching methodologies for Spanish as an FL. The corpus of utterances has been taken from the recording of a role-play activity carried out in class, which consisted of the preparation and representation of several theatre fragments.
These were analysed following the Prosodic Analysis of Speech method (Cantero, 2019 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331287155_Francisco_Jose_Cantero_Serena_2019_Analisis_prosodico_del_habla_mas_alla_de_la_melodia), which allows us to examine the three prosodic dimensions of the utterances: their melody, dynamics and rhythm (tone, intensity and duration), using objective acoustic criteria, thus establishing a detailed profile for each one.
