Warm-up
- Review of sounds of the English language
- Tongue twisters practicing voiced "th" and unvoiced "th".
Main Section
Word stress and Intonation
Stress-timing: We can
illustrate with almost any word of two or more syllables – for example,
“syllable.” We stress this word using the pattern Ooo, placing primary
emphasis on the first segment of the word. In English every long word
has its own stress pattern.
Think of the words “import” and “record,” for example. Both words can
be pronounced using either the pattern Oo or the pattern oO. Which
pattern you use fundamentally changes the meaning of the word.
Something else happens after you choose which syllable to stress. The pronunciation of the main vowel in the unstressed syllable changes, often to the sound ‘uh’ which is the single most common sound in the English language. This sound has its own special name, schwa, and about 30 per cent of the sounds we make when we speak English are the sound schwa. In English, schwa can be represented by any vowel.
For example, consider the following two-syllable words. The first word uses the stress pattern Oo; the second, the stress pattern oO. You will notice that in each case we pronounce the unstressed vowel as schwa, regardless of its spelling.
Something else happens after you choose which syllable to stress. The pronunciation of the main vowel in the unstressed syllable changes, often to the sound ‘uh’ which is the single most common sound in the English language. This sound has its own special name, schwa, and about 30 per cent of the sounds we make when we speak English are the sound schwa. In English, schwa can be represented by any vowel.
For example, consider the following two-syllable words. The first word uses the stress pattern Oo; the second, the stress pattern oO. You will notice that in each case we pronounce the unstressed vowel as schwa, regardless of its spelling.
A: Atlas; Canoe
E: College; Reveal
I: Cousin; Disease
O: Anchor; Contain
U: Lettuce; Support
Exercise 1:
At the top of each column, write the numbers 1, 2, and 3 to represent each syllable, but in each column one of the numbers should be underlined to show the syllable that is stressed.
| 1 – 2 – 3 | 1 – 2 – 3 | 1 – 2 – 3 |
telephone, magazine, religion, swimming pool, Italy, banana, bicycle, dangerous, difficult, exciting, exercise, favourite, photograph, typical, religion, instrument, library, beautiful
(can you add some to this list?)
Take a look at the following list of stressed and non-stressed word types.
Basically, stress words are considered CONTENT WORDS such as:
Non-stressed words are considered FUNCTION WORDS such as
Exericise 2:
Mark the stressed words in the following sentences. After you have found the stressed words, practice reading the sentences aloud.
Basically, stress words are considered CONTENT WORDS such as:
- Nouns e.g. kitchen, Peter
- (most) principle verbs e.g. visit, construct
- Adjectives e.g. beautiful, interesting
- Adverbs e.g. often, carefully
Non-stressed words are considered FUNCTION WORDS such as
- Determiners e.g. the, a, some, a few
- Auxiliary verbs e.g. don't, am, can, were
- Prepositions e.g. before, next to, opposite
- Conjunctions e.g. but, while, as
- Pronouns e.g. they, she, us
Exericise 2:
Mark the stressed words in the following sentences. After you have found the stressed words, practice reading the sentences aloud.
- John is coming over tonight. We are going to work on our homework together.
- Ecstasy is an extremely dangerous drug.
- We should have visited some more castles while we were traveling through the back roads of France.
- Jack bought a new car last Friday.
- They are looking forward to your visiting them next January.
- Exciting discoveries lie in Tom's future.
- Would you like to come over and play a game of chess?
- They have been having to work hard these last few months on their challenging experiment.
- Shakespeare wrote passionate, moving poetry.
- As you might have expected, he has just thought of a new approach to the problem
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