Sentence and word stress in the ESL classroom

Stressed-timed language: Stressed syllables tend to occur at roughly equal intervals in time.

Syllable-timed language: Rhythmic beat by recurrences of syllables, not stresses.

Spanish is a syllable-timed language. When Spanish speakers transfer the intonation patterns of their native language into English, which is a stress-timed language, the result can be barely comprehensible to native English speakers. This is because the meaning or information usually conveyed in English by the combination of stress, pitch and rhythm in a sentence is flattened or evened out by the Spanish learner.

The following lesson is designed to enable students to identify and place sentence-level stress on content words and reduce the function words in order to produce stress-timed rhythm. The activities consider visual and auditory learners. The last activity takes advantage of cooperative learning and provides students with the opportunity to share their experience and get feedback from their classmates. The lesson uses both inductive and deductive strategies, providing students with the background and theory but also allowing them to discuss initial perceptions and make predictions. This lesson could extend to the following class session, depending on how quickly students grasp the concept of stress-timed language.

Sentence and Word Stress Lesson

1. The teacher starts the class by dragging the end of a ruler on a smooth surface and then on an irregular surface. This activity is used to illustrate stress-timed and syllable-timed languages, followed by the definition of each.

2. After having listened to an audio taped speech in Spanish and English, students make correlations with their own language and talk about their perception of the English rhythm. Finally, they determine which language is syllable-stressed and which is time-stressed. The rationale for devoting part of the class to discussing this matter is to allow students to have a clear understanding of the difference between the stress-timed nature of English and the syllable –timing of Spanish.

3. Sentence stress awareness will be built on students` knowledge of word stress. It is important to remind students that a tonic syllable has a longer duration, is louder and has a more prominent pitch movement. They are given a handout that shows the connection between word stress and sentence stress. Then, students are asked to differentiate function from content words. They will also be given a list of “Content versus Function Words”.

4. Listening Discrimination:

Students listen to the following sentences and write down the stressed words:

Nice to meet you

My name is Ray

I’ve got to go.

I’m sorry.

Want a ride?

That`d be great!

What do you do?

I’m a physician.

After students have identified stress in short sentences, they can be introduced to longer stretches of speech. A listening discrimination activity that is fun as well as effective is jazz chanting. To begin the activity, the teacher provides an explanation and an example of primary and secondary stress. Next, the teacher provides students with the jazz chant and after reading it, students have to predict where the stresses are. They also attempt to mark the primary stress with a large dot and the secondary stress with a smaller one over the word. Afterwards, students listen to the chant recording and make comparisons with their predictions.

5. Guided practice and feedback:

The teacher asks students to imagine themselves in a cafeteria crowded with noisy people. They have to call out a message across the cafeteria to a friend. Since it is very noisy, their friend will not be able to understand every single word, but it is the students’ responsibility to ensure that the main idea gets across. The objective of the activity is to promote learners` further understanding of word prominence and the fact that function words can be inferred by the interlocutor when they are not heard.

Half of the class receives utterances on paper slips (Handout 4) and then decides which word(s) will receive primary or secondary stress and which will be unstressed. In order to help students visualize the degree of stress each word will receive, they can cut up the sentences and place the words in different levels.

They sit facing each other keeping some distance and then say the utterance while fairly loud music/noise is playing in the background. The music will make the students say the prominent words louder.

After the activity, pairs get together to discuss what was heard and discuss why they were successful or unsuccessful in carrying out the task. In an open-group discussion, students share their experience, comment on each others` performance or make suggestions.

References

Frankfurt International School. A guide to learning English. The differences between English and Spanish. http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/langdiff/spanish.htm

Ribeiro, Evelise. “Pronunciation intervention for visiting Spanish speaking faculty.” Master’s Thesis, Georgia State University.