Syllables, Stress and More /iy/

Hello!

Today we took a short detour from our adventure with vowels to talk about syllables. We will do much more with syllables and word stress later. For now we just needed a brief orientation to syllables and stress.

I asked you what a syllable is and you first told me that it's a part of a word. Yes, it is! What else? Together we discovered that every syllable has a vowel sound. If every language has a certain music, then to learn the music of English, we must learn the rhythm of English. To do this, we have to learn about syllables and stress.

I handed Ahmed G. a large item covered in a big fabric case and asked him to open it. What was inside? It was my djembe. That's an African drum. Together we talked about syllables and passed the drum around so that we could beat out the syllables of different words.

I made four columns on the board and asked you all to give me some food words. Together we figured out where to put each word: column one for one-syllable words; column two for two-syllable words, etc.

Next we talked about stress. What is word stress? You told me that there is always one syllable that is stronger. That's right. The stressed syllable is longer. It has a clearer vowel sound. It also has higher pitch and is sometimes a bit louder.

With this new information, I asked you to look again at our handout from yesterday. In some words we hold the /iy/ sound longer than in other words.

For example, we hold it longer in: tea, bean, meal and three.

We don't hold the /iy/ sound quite as long in pizza, peach, repeat or meat.

What's the rule?

1. All vowels are longer before a voiced consonant.
2. All vowels are longer in a stressed open syllable.
3. Vowels are not held as long before voiceless consonants.
4. Vowels are not held as long in unstressed open syllables.

So now you know why I don't like to use the terms "short" and "long" vowels in our class. Those words are great for teaching little Canadian children about vowels. But you are not children. We are adults. The fact is that all vowels are longer before voiced consonants. So I will be using different words to classify the vowels.

After talking about the rule, we did some more practice with the /iy/ sound in words.

See you tomorrow in the computer lab. On Monday we will resume vowels with the /I/ sound.

More Voiced / Voiceless Contrasts

Hello, Students!

I got a bit behind in my writing here, didn't I?

On Tuesday we reviewed voiced and voiceless sounds. Then we learned how to make the voiced TH sound. This is the sound in "the," "then," "they" and "than," isn't it? We did some listening work and some work with minimal pairs with partners. At the end of the class we looked at some intriguing photographs from magazines and talked about them with our partners using "I think..." to practice voiceless TH and words like "the," "they" and "that" to practice voiced TH. For example, "I think the woman is a mother. I think the doorbell is ringing. I think the baby will be in trouble."

On Wednesday we again reviewed voicing. I asked you to give me voiced sounds as I listed them on the whiteboard. Across from those we listed the voiceless sounds that are made the same way in the mouth. We came up with: /b/ and /p/, /g/ and /k/, etc. We also listed a few consonant sounds that do not have any voiceless counterpart in English, like /r/, /l/ and /y/.

Then we focused on the voiced/voiceless pair /d/ and /t/. We did some listening and recognition practice before speaking practice. We read a story and tried to identify the three ways that the regular past tense ending can be pronounced. We came up with /t/, /d/ and /Id/.

We took all the verbs from the story and placed them into one of three columns. Then we tried to find the pattern or rule. We decided that when a verb ends in a /t/ or /d/ sound, the past tense ending sounds like /Id/. Otherwise, a final voiced sound makes the past tense ending /d/ and a voiceless final sound makes it sound like /t/.

For our final activity that day we interviewed our partners to find out what they used to do "always, sometimes, or never" when we were children. For example, one question was, "When you were young, did you kiss your mother goodbye in the morning?" The answer would be "Yes, I always kissed her goodbye," "Well, I sometimes kissed her goodbye," or "No, I never kissed her goodbye." I noticed that you helped each other figure out how to say the past tense endings and made notes for yourselves using the phonetic symbols. That's great!