The oral component has played an important role in literature since ancient times when most literary works were meant to be orally transmitted. These early works were addressed to the ear as well as to the eyes and adapted to the demands of oral performance so as to facilitate its transmission to an audience. Undoubtedly, the successful transmission and reception of an oral message depends on the effective use of phonological resources. As phonetics teachers, we try to help our students develop the ability to use this type of resources effectively and become competent readers aloud. To achieve this aim, we make Literature and Phonology converge on the subject English Phonetics and Phonology II, which is part of the programme of studies at the School of Languages, UNC. By the end of the course, students are fully aware of the importance of phonological resources in the construction of oral texts and they noticeably improve their ability to read aloud.
The aim of this presentation is to share our experience as participants, together with our students, in the Book Fair annually organized in Córdoba. Our participation in this event started in 2004, when we encouraged our students to make a public presentation of some of the activities they performed in class. As the years went by, what began as a half an hour presentation organized by Literature and Phonetics English teachers became a two-hour multilingual event with teachers and students from the training courses in other languages.
During our presentation we will refer to the theoretical background that supports our instruction: 1) the Theory of Orientation (Brazil 1997; Brazil et al 1980), which allow students become, from a phonological perspective, committed and engaged readers aloud and 2) a taxonomy of paralinguistic features (Brown 1990) which help readers aloud to express some kind of feeling or attitude about the verbal content of a text. Next, we will refer to the work done in class with different texts and to the preparation before the event. We will finally point out the benefits of this activity and its positive results.
