beginning reading and writing Spanish strand TEKS talk image

Knowledge and Skills Statement

Developing and sustaining foundational language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking--beginning reading and writing. The student develops word structure knowledge through phonological awareness, print concepts, phonics, and morphology to communicate, decode, and spell.

Have students work on a teacher-generated worksheet that includes a paragraph with verbs, in different tenses, that require accents, but don’t have accents marked. Ask students to identify those verbs that require accents and mark the accents as appropriate.

Further Explanation

This SE requires the students to be familiar with verb conjugations and verb tenses. Students should understand that palabras agudas carry the pronunciation stress on the last syllable, palabras graves carry the stress on the penultimate syllable, and palabras esdrújulas carry the stress on the antepenultimate syllable. This knowledge is important for them to understand when is appropriate to use an accent mark in some verb tenses. They should also know the type of actions or events to which verb tenses refer.

Both decoding and encoding skills are needed to build a foundation in reading. Decoding is the process of translating written speech into verbal speech sounds by applying knowledge of letter-sound correspondences. Encoding is the process of using letter-sound knowledge to write or spell words. Students must understand the various spelling patterns and rules of the Spanish language to correctly construct words in their written products. It is important that students apply these rules consistently instead of using invented spelling because they may unknowingly write a word that is real but that they did not intend, causing confusion for their reader.
Students should be able to mark accents when conjugating verbs. Verbs in the past and future tenses are usually spelled with an accent mark on the syllable that carries the pronunciation stress. For instance, the verb imaginar is conjugated to imaginé (simple past), imaginaba (imperfect past), habría imaginado (perfect conditional) and imaginaré (future).