Transcript Advanced Spoken English

Advanced Spoken
English
Phonology session 2
Stress & Weak Forms
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Outcomes
At the end of today’s session you will:
be ready to respond to any feedback from
your teacher in your speaking portfolio
 understand the concept of stress
 be able to identify and practise word stress
 be able to recognise and use de-stressed
syllables (weak forms)
be ready to do the next speaking task

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Speaking portfolio: feedback
 Is
available on Moodle
 Read my feedback, both online and
on paper, and reply with your
response to my feedback.
 Some of you need to re-record the
whole thing, others may need to
answer questions from me, others
might have a short response only.
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Today’s focus: stress
 Basic
stress: within a word
 Basic stress: within a pause group
 Why is stress important?
 Word stress - the brain organises
words according to stress patterns!
 Sentence stress - it helps the listener
know what to focus on.
 (Don’t just ‘spit out’ your sentences!)
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Word stress
 Any
word with more than one
syllable has one ‘strong’ stress.
 That syllable is louder, longer, higher
pitch, and has a clear vowel sound.
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Practising word stress

Say the following words:
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–
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–
–
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–
–
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–
–
Saturday
Afternoon
Beautiful
America
Morning
Quietly
Suitcase
Comfortable
Photograph
Binoculars
breakfast
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De-stressing the rest of the
word
 Often,
when a syllable is NOT
stressed, the vowel gets “lost” and
we use the “schwa”
 Look at the text (in the handout) of
the words you just practised.
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Content vs. Structure words
All of the ‘grammatical’ words are
UNSTRESSED
 Almost always, they have a ‘schwa’ as a
vowel. This is called the ‘weak form’ of the
word.
 Only on special occasions do grammatical
words get the full vowel.
 Find some examples of weak forms in
the handout.

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More practice:
Connected Speech
Use level 1 only today!
 Choose someone you like the look of –
you may like to listen to their text first.
 Click on the ‘stress’ button
 Click on identify ‘content’ words
 Then, the next exercise: which
‘information word’ is most important
according to a context.

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Practise DE-stressing words
and syllables

Practise reading
the text from the
handout, then
record your voice,
and compare your
recording with this
one:
example schwa text.mp3
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Speaking portfolio task
 Post
your best recording of the
“Barbara…” text into your speaking
portfolio. (with weak forms!)
 Listen to your own recording, and
answer the questions in the portfolio
instructions.
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