Stress and Vowel Quality

Hello, students of the seniors' class!

Since we had only a four-day school week and Fridays are special, we didn't tackle a new topic. Rather, we focused this week on making our stressed vowels longer, louder / higher in pitch, and clearer.

We reviewed the difference between CONTENT WORDS and FUNCTION WORDS.

English is a stress-timed language.  We practiced the rhythm of many sentences.

Here is a great video on this topic.

Can and Can't

Hello!

Today I started class with a bit of silliness. I said, "I can raise one eyebrow at a time. Can you?" I said, "My mother can wiggle her ears. Can you?" I said, "My friend can touch his tongue to his nose. Can you?"

We found out that Federico can touch his nose with his tongue.

Today's lesson was about the pronunciation of can and can't. Yesterday we learned about when function words can be stressed. When a function word is stressed, we call that its strong form. When we reduce it, which we do in normal speech, that is called its weak form.

Together we built the table of strong and weak forms for can, will, have, he and some other function words.

We practiced saying some sentences with can and can't. We said that can't is always stressed. Why? I heard two people say, "because it's negative." That's right. Negatives are content words. We said that can is usually reduced, but not always. When do we use the strong form of can? We will see if you know the answer to that tomorrow when we take up the homework!

Next we did a listening exercise. You were to circle the word you heard me say: can or can't. We took those up, then you practiced choosing one or the other to see if the rest of the class and I could tell which one you were saying. There were many things we needed to do to make ourselves clearly understood:

1. Except at the end of a sentence, can needs to be short with a schwa sound.
2. With regard to rhythm, can doesn't get a full beat.
3. When you say can't, I need to hear a nice clear vowel sound.
4. Can't does get a full beat.
5. Also, Federico noticed that you can often hear a little pause at the end of the word can't. That's the unreleased /t/. He has a good ear!

Next we practiced those with our partners.

Finally we played a little game. It was a contest. Each person had to come up with five things they can do and five they can't do. Points were awarded for anything you came up with that you could do but nobody else in the class could do. Points were also awarded for anything you could NOT do that everyone else in the class could do. Bashar got a point for being able to play the guitar, Florin got a point for being able to drive a boat, Ina got a point for being able to speak Russian, Tania got a point for being able to play the flute, Federico got a point for being able to extract a molar, and I got a point for being able to speak some Japanese.

I wish we'd had time to play all the rounds of that game, but we ran out of time.

For homework, I gave you a challenging word game and gap-fill. You have nine words to unscramble. Those words go in the blanks in the paragraph. The paragraph is about the rules of pronouncing can and can't. Also, some of the squares where you will write the unscrambled words have little numbers on them. I showed you how to build a phrase at the bottom of the page using the numbered letters in unscrambled words.

Good luck with that. I can't wait to take it up tomorrow!

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!

The Focus Word

Hello!

Before everyone arrived in class, I polled a few of you to find out how you liked using the pronunciation quizzes in Ellis Intro. Many of you told me you wish you could access Ellis from home. I'm sorry to say that it isn't available via the Internet, but I'm glad so many of you like using it and feel that it's very helpful to you. Some of you chose to use Ellis Intro and some of you chose to stick with Master Pronunciation Course to work on your consonant and vowel sounds. That's fine.

Earlier this week we learned that content words are usually stressed and function words are usually reduced. That is a good foundation for training ourselves in the music of English, but it's not the whole story.

We started the class by talking about the meaning of the words "focus" and "pitch." You gave me lots of good definitions for focus, and Florin made us all laugh when he came up with "I have a Ford Focus." He always comes up with higher level nuances of words for us to learn and think about. Bashar gave us a good definition for pitch. It's how your voice goes higher and lower while you're talking. It's different from volume, which means how loud your voice is. A change in volume is also part of the music of English, though.

Today we learned that every clause or sentence has one word that receives the biggest focus. (In the case of choices, there can be two words that share the main focus.) That means we stress them the most. We repeated some sentences; you told me which word in each sentence sounded most stressed. There was a pattern. When you only have one sentence, or when you are beginning a conversation, the last content word is the main focus word.

Examples: The car hit a pedestrian. My dog likes water. What are you doing?

We practiced the intonation of some more sentences by humming them. Then we practiced them orally, making sure to make our stressed vowels longer and clearer.

Then we looked at a dialogue between two people. We saw that after the first sentence, the focus word is no longer always the last content word in the clause or sentence. The focus shifts! What is the rule governing how the focus shifts? We discovered one situation where focus shifts: the introduction of NEW INFORMATION.

Example:

A: What do you want to do after class?

B: Let's go to the AGW.

A: I've already seen the AGW.

B: [etc.]

In line two, AGW is the new information. But in line three, AGW is old news. Now seen is the new information.

With this new rule under our belts, we worked in pairs to identify the focus words in a series of short dialogues. We took each one up and then practiced them with our partners. We took turns performing them for the class, too.

Ghadeer said today's lesson was too easy. Well, don't worry. We are building a firm foundation for mastery over the music of English. If you can do this, you are well on your way to sounding very natural in English.

Have a good weekend, and I'll see you Monday.

Introduction to Sentence Stress

Hello!

Over the past two weeks we have been learning to count syllables, identify the stressed syllable, and pronounce the schwa sound. We now know that the stressed syllable is longer, clearer, maybe a bit louder, and has a slightly higher pitch. Now we have a good foundation for the rhythm and music of English.

Today I told you that most of the languages of the world can be divided into two main categories. Spanish, French, Cantonese Chinese, and Romanian are syllable-timed languages. That means that a sentence with 12 syllables takes four times as long to say as a sentence with three syllables.

English, Arabic, Russian, Swedish and Mandarin Chinese are in a different category. Before telling you what we call that category, I had you play a little game. I gave you each a telegram that was too long, too expensive. Your job was to make it cheaper. Each word was $1 and we started with 28 words. I only had $13, so you had to eliminate 15 unnecessary words without losing the meaning.

After we finished cutting out the unnecessary words, we made two lists: words we kept and words we threw out. I told you that the words we kept are called content words. These are the words that carry meaning. The words we discarded are called function words or grammar words. You need them for good English, but you don't really need them for meaning.

We talk to animals and very small babies using content words. Think about these:

"Bad dog!"

"Stove hot!"

"Good girl!"

In the next activity, we practiced saying a short sentence: Cows eat grass. I asked you how many beats there are in this sentence. You said three. That's correct. And how many content words? Three.

Then we looked at "The cows eat grass." We counted the content words (still three). And we counted the big beats. It's still three, isn't it? We barely say the word "the." It gets squeezed in and almost sounds like part of the word cows, doesn't it? What about the vowel sound in "the?" You're right; it's schwa!

We kept adding more and more function words to the sentence, but we still only had three big beats when we said it! It takes the same amount of time to say "The cows will have eaten the grass" as it takes to say "Cows eat grass." Isn't that amazing?

English is a stress-timed language.

In the next activity, we practiced saying some sentences. We drummed on our desks and tried to keep the same time between content words. "Dogs chase cats." "A dog has chased the cat." Each of those sentences should take the same amount of time for you to say. They have three big beats.

We then talked about the parts of speech that we usually stress in English and the parts of speech that we usually don't stress. I gave you a handout with the lists. We usually stress nouns, main verbs, adjectives, numbers, question words, negatives, helping verbs when they are alone (e.g., "Yes, I am."), etc. We quickly came up with examples for each category.

Finally we looked at some sentences and underlined the words that get the stress (all the content words). We took turns saying those sentences while stressing the content words.

Good work! See you Tuesday in the lab!