Teach Pronunciation – Part Two

How to Teach Pronunciation – Part Two

I hope you downloaded and read the materials in the last pronunciation post about linking and have worked a bit on respelling. Both notions are critical if you wish to help your students with pronunciation skills.

Word and Sentence Stress

Add to respelling the notion of word and sentence stress. Many EFL students around the world will have different stress patterns in their language.

When you pronounce words with two or more syllables, one syllable will be stressed more than the others. Until you practice a bit you may have trouble hearing stress because it is such a natural part of a native-speaker’s speech. Here is what to listen for: tone, length of time, loudness.

For example:

Banana – sounds like buh NAEH nuh

If you listen carefully the middle syllable has a slightly higher tone, lasts longer, and is slightly louder.

But Thai students, for example, will say: buh naeh NUH

Sentences will have similar stress patterns that students need to learn, and respelling can help them with that too.

Some words are not so important to hear and are reduced in time, loudness and tone. Some are more important and are louder, longer, and have a higher tone.

The important words are called “Content Words” – they are nouns, main verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Less important words are called “Function Words” and are pronouns, helping verbs, conjunctions, and prepositions. These rules are not ALWAYS true, but are good general guidelines.

Example: My name is Bob when written showing sentence stress sounds and looks more like: my NAME is BOB.  Name and Bob being the most important parts of the communication.

Don’t overdo word and sentence stress.  It is important to speak naturally when teaching your students stress. You, after all, want your students to speak naturally too.

Think about sentence stress a bit like this:   When you talk on a mobile or cell phone, you often don’t hear every word and you don’t need to. You get the “gist” of the sentence from hearing the important words. Those are the words that are stressed in a sentence.

Word and sentence stress takes a lot of practice. But the practice is well worthwhile as your students will benefit greatly from your efforts. Don’t worry about getting it slightly wrong. It is more important that you just try it and work with it and develop your skills with it. It WILL make you a much better teacher in the long run.

Excellent resources to help you learn more:

Word Stress

Sentence Stress

Kent University Phonetics Resource Page

The British Council Pronunciation Page

An excellent How to Teach Pronunciation eBook

TED’s Tips™ #1: Visit the websites from the links above and get familiar with sentence and word stress

TED’s Tips™ #2: Put it all together, practice a bit and get to work with your students on REALLY helping them improve their verbal communication skills.