Spanish Pronunciation - Reading in Spanish

Are Accent Marks Really that Important in Spanish?

In the classroom we often face the task of making our students understand just how important accent marks are in Spanish. Given the fact that the languages of many of our students make little or no use of accent marks, helping these students understand the importance of accents in Spanish should be a top priority. This must be followed by a simple and clear explanation of the system of Spanish accent mark usage, which could even be just a rudimentary description that doesn’t necessarily have to include details on special cases.

Our classes are often made up of students who speak different native languages, and the “natural” tendency, especially with beginning level groups (A1 and A2) leads many to use English as a lingua franca during the learning process. English generally doesn’t have accent marks. We can attack the matter of accents from the listening flank by having students correctly read out loud vocabulary they’ve never heard before. Students reading English words they’ve never heard before often don’t know how to exactly pronounce those words and they have to refer to dictionaries or audio recordings, etc.

Spanish makes things a lot easier for us when facing a word that we’ve never heard before: all we have to do is advise our students of the following: MOST SPANISH WORDS DO NOT HAVE ACCENT MARKS. And most here means that a large amount of Spanish words have two common features: first, the last letter of the word is a vowel, an N or an S, and second, the stress is placed on the second to the last syllable.

So, if our students come across words like armario, escritorio, biblioteca, etc. (assuming of course that the words are spelled correctly), they can be sure that they are pronounced arMArio, escriTOrio, biblioTEca.

When reading a new word that has an accent mark, the accent always marks the place on which the stress falls, as in soFÁ, teLÉfono, MÚsica, etc. No problem up to here.

But students will also come across words that are spelled without an accent and which don’t follow the rules we talked about earlier, words like reloj, febril, hogar, moral, any verb in the infinitive (zarandear, mirar, murmurar, abducir, sobreentender), etc.

What these words have in common is that they do NOT end in a vowel or an N or an S, unlike most Spanish words. Okay, here comes the third and final rule for reading/pronouncing correctly a word with NO accent mark and which does NOT end in a vowel, an N, or an S. The stress on these words always falls on the last syllable: reLOJ, feBRIL, hoGAR, moRAL; zarandeAR, miRAR, murmuRAR, abduCIR, sobreentenDER.

And that’s all there is to it.

When you start teaching the Pretérito Perfecto Simple you could point out the importance of the accent for avoiding the confusion of words such as Hablo and Habló. You could also start teaching other relevant situations in which the accent can change the meaning of a word: Él tiene el libro… a good first step for dealing with the “problem” of understanding accents.

If we’re able to make them understand the effectiveness of the system, the presence and necessity of accents in written Spanish texts, it will be clear to our students and it will no longer be a problem in the classroom.