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Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions all over the world were forced to make the executive decision of quickly and effectively transferring face-to-face classes into an online format. Issues such as technical difficulties, varying degrees of digital literacy within a given team of teachers or the question of how to preserve the essence of face-to-face classes in an online environment are among the many challenges that have affected and hindered the practice of instructors all over the world. With a focus on the teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language (Español como Lengua Extranjera, ELE) and video-conferencing platforms such as the software known as Zoom, in this paper we discuss the importance of continuing the practice of teaching speaking in an online environment. Subsequently, we present a number of strategies that we have put into practice in our online ELE classrooms in order to try and maintain the same or very similar level of interaction between our students when compared to face-to-face classrooms.

This paper discusses the corpus of Gran Canarian Spanish gathered in 2016 in order to provide an in-depth sociolinguistic account of the lenition processes identified in the dialect. After a detailed description of the methodology and database preparation, I present two case studies showcasing the utility of such corpora. First, I show the phonetic and social factors governing the distribution of different surface variants of the underlying coda /s/, pointing to generalised variation and hence incompleteness of any of the weakening options. Second, I provide a comparison of the spontaneous speech produced by the 6 informants of the corpus with their productions from a laboratory study, which leads to the conclusion that variation is subject to yet another important factor: social setting and that the options chosen on each occasion are reflections of competing stages on the same lenition trajectory systematically applied by language users.

There is a growing body of literature that recognises the relationship between musical aptitude and language proficiency. Language is usually segmented into its subcategories when addressed in studies, while music is not. Due to this, it is unclear whether language proficiency is related to all music components (pitch, rhythm, etc.) in the same way. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between musical aptitude and receptive pronunciation in a foreign language, in this case, English. To achieve it, a field research study has been designed, in which participated 71 second grade 7-8-year-old students (34 boys and 37 girls) from a bilingual public school. Two tests were administered to measure their musical aptitude and their ability of discriminating phonemes. The musical test consisted of six exercises that assessed the different sub-skills of musical aptitude (pitch, loudness, duration, rhythm, timbre and tempo perception). On the other hand, the pronunciation test measured their auditory ability to differentiate phonemes in a foreign language. Our results show a positive correlation between musical aptitude and the identification of foreign language sounds.