Stress for Correcting and Contrasting

Hello, students!

We have a new student. Welcome, Morgan! That's a pretty name, isn't it?

Today we started class by looking at some comic strips from the Windsor Star. I asked you to notice the bold type and underlining. The cartoonist used bold and underlining to show you which words are most stressed.

Then I asked you about two of the cartoons. What was going on there? Ghadeer said, "They stressed a function word!"

Oh, my goodness. I thought we said that content words are stressed and function words are reduced. We did say that, right? Yes, we did. The characters in the cartoon are breaking that rule. I asked you to think about why we might sometimes break that rule.

Ghadeer said we can break the rule if the function word is important. Exactly! I asked you to think about some situations where a function word might be important. We talked about some of those.

Next we looked at the following sentence written six different ways:

His book is in her desk.
His book is in her desk.
His book is in her desk.
His book is in her desk.
His book is in her desk.
His book is in her desk.

We practiced saying the sentence the six different ways and talked about the nuance of each. They answer different questions. Whose book? His what? Really? On her desk? In whose desk? In her what?

I told you that I am in a situation similar to yours. You often have to ask native speakers to repeat themselves. I also have a situation like that because my boyfriend is a low talker. He mumbles. When you don't understand someone, you don't have to ask for the whole sentence to be repeated. You can just ask for the part you didn't hear. Example: "You're going WHERE?" "Your mother said WHAT?"

Next we practiced some sentence pairs. Speaker A was making a false statement and speaker B was correcting him or her. How did speaker B choose the focus word? The focus word was the word that corrected the false imformation, right? We practiced those orally and then with a partner.

After that we had some more sentence pairs where a function word was sometimes stressed. For example, a store clerk says, "We have the Windsor Star and the National Post." The customer says, "I'll take a Windsor Star AND a National Post."

For our final activity, we were supposed to go around the room and say some statements for each other to see what the response would be. For example: Wen is from Japan. The response would be, as you know, "No, Wen is from CHINA. However, I found that you were all feeling shy today and didn't want to work with anyone but your first partner. That was okay, because we were able to do the homework assignment in class.

The homework was a gap-fill exercise. It was a list of the seven focus rules. When you finished the gap-fill, you had all seven focus rules!

Tomorrow we will finish sentence stress and then start a new unit. See you then!