1 Advanced Spoken English Phonology session 2 Stress & Weak Forms

2 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

3 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.

4 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!)

5 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.

6 Practising word stress  Say the following words: –Saturday –Afternoon –Beautiful –America –Morning –Quietly –Suitcase –Comfortable –Photograph –Binoculars –breakfast

7 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.

8 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.

9 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.

10 Practise DE-stressing words and syllables  Practise reading the text from the handout, then record your voice, and compare your recording with this one:

11 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.