Pronunciation - Practicing Stress and Intonation

I am often surprised at how focusing on the "stress - timed" quality of English helps students improve
their pronunciation skills. Students often focus on pronouncing each word correctly and therefore tend
to pronounce in an unnatural manner. By focusing on the stress - timed factor in English - the fact
that only principle words such as proper nouns, principle verbs, adjectives and adverbs receive the
"stress" - students soon begin sounding much more "authentic" as the cadence of the language begins
to ring true. The following lesson focuses on raising awareness of this issue and includes practice
exercises.

Aim: Improving pronunciation by focusing on the stress - time nature of spoken English

Activity: Awareness raising followed by practical application exercises

Level: Pre - intermediate to upper intermediate depending on student needs and awareness

Outline:

• Begin awareness raising activities by reading an example sentence aloud to the students (for
example: The boys didn't have time to finish their homework before the lesson began). Read the
sentence the first time pronouncing each word carefully. Read the sentence a second time in
natural speech.
• Ask students which reading seemed more natural and why it seemed more natural.
• Using the ideas students come up with, explain the idea of English being a "stress - timed"
language. If the students speak a syllabic language (such as Italian or Spanish), point out the
difference between their own native language and English (theirs being syllabic, English stress -
timed). Just this awareness raising can make a dramatic difference in such students abilities.
• Talk about the differences between stressed words and non-stressed words (i.e. principle
verbs are stressed, auxiliary verbs are not).
• Write the following two sentences on the board:

 The beautiful Mountain appeared transfixed in the distance.

 He can come on Sundays as long as he doesn't have to do any homework in the
evening.

Underline the stressed words in both sentences. Ask students to try reading aloud. Point out how
each sentence seems to be approximately the same length in "stress - time".

• Ask students to look through the example sentences and underline the words that should be
stressed in the worksheet.
• Circulate about the room asking students to read the sentences aloud once they have decided
which words should receive stresses.
• Review activity as a class - ask students to first read any given sentence with each word
pronounced followed by the "stress - timed" version. Expect a surprise at the quick improvement
students make in pronunciation (I am every time I do this exercise)!!

Pronunciation Help - Sentence Stress

Take a look at the following list of stressed and non-stressed word types.

Basically, stress words are considered CONTENT WORDS such as

 • Nouns e.g. kitchen, Peter
• (most) principle verbs e.g. visit, construct
• Adjectives e.g. beautiful, interesting
• Adverbs e.g. often, carefully

Non-stressed words are considered FUNCTION WORDS such as

• Determiners e.g. the, a, some, a few

• Auxiliary verbs e.g. don't, am, can, were
• Prepositions e.g. before, next to, opposite
• Conjunctions e.g. but, while, as
• Pronouns e.g. they, she, us

Mark the stressed words in the following sentences. After you have found the stressed
words, practice reading the sentences aloud.

• John is coming over tonight. We are going to work on our homework together.
• Ecstasy is an extremely dangerous drug.
• We should have visited some more castles while we were traveling through the back roads of
France.
• Jack bought a new car last Friday.
• They are looking forward to your visiting them next January.
• Exciting discoveries lie in Tom's future.
• Would you like to come over and play a game of chess?
• They have been having to work hard these last few months on their challenging experiment.
• Shakespeare wrote passionate, moving poetry.
• As you might have expected, he has just thought of a new approach to the problem.

Word stress (BBC English)

Submitted by TE Editor on 21 February, 2005 - 13:00

A major benefit of focusing students on how words are stressed is the extra mental engagement
with the word that it gives. A language learner needs to engage with a word many times,
preferably in different ways, in order to really learn it - identifying and practising word stress can
provide one or two of those engagements.

• Why word stress is important

• What word stress is

• Some 'rules' of word stress

• How I help my students

 • In the classroom

• Conclusion

Why word stress is important

Mistakes in word stress are a common cause of misunderstanding in English. Here are the
reasons why:

• Stressing the wrong syllable in a word can make the word very difficult to
hear and understand; for example, try saying the following words:

oO Oo
b'tell hottle

•
And now in a sentence:
"I carried the b'tell to the hottle."

Now reverse the stress patterns for the two words and you should be able to
make sense of the sentence!
"I carried the bottle to the hotel."

• Stressing a word differently can change the meaning or type of the word:
"They will desert* the desert** by tomorrow."

oO Oo
desert* desert**

•
Think about the grammatical difference between desert* and desert**.
I will look at this in more detail later.

• Even if the speaker can be understood, mistakes with word stress can make
the listener feel irritated, or perhaps even amused, and could prevent good
communication from taking place.

These three reasons tell me that word stress is an important part of the English language, and it is
something I should help my students with.

What word stress is

When we stress syllables in words, we use a combination of different features. Experiment now
with the word 'computer'. Say it out loud. Listen to yourself. The second syllable of the three is
stressed. What are you doing so that the listener can hear that stress?
 • A stressed syllable combines five features:
o It is l-o-n-g-e-r - com p-u-ter
o It is LOUDER - comPUTer
o It has a change in pitch from the syllables coming before and
afterwards. The pitch of a stressed syllable is usually higher.
o It is said more clearly -The vowel sound is purer. Compare the first
and last vowel sounds with the stressed sound.
o It uses larger facial movements - Look in the mirror when you say
the word. Look at your jaw and lips in particular.

It is equally important to remember that the unstressed syllables of a word have the opposite
features of a stressed syllable!

Some 'rules' of word stress

There are patterns in word stress in English but, as a rule (!), it is dangerous to say there are fixed
rules. Exceptions can usually be found.

• Here are some general tendencies for word stress in English:

Excepti
Word Type of word Tendency
ons

stress on the first

apple
syllable hotel
table two-syllable nouns
and adjectives Oo lagoon
happy
apple

the noun has stress

on the first syllable
Oo
"You are the
suspect words which can
suspect!" respect
import be used as both
the verb has stress witness
insult nouns and verbs
on the second
syllable
oO
"I suspect you."

hairbru compound nouns fairly equally

sh balanced but with
football stronger stress
on the first part
Oo
 hairbrush

How I help my students

Students can be alarmed when they meet words which are similar but have different stress
patterns:

O o o O oo O o o oooOo

equal equality equalise equalisation

A useful thing you can do is to help students see connections with other word families. Patterns
can usually be found, for example:

O o o O oo Ooo oooOo
final finality finalise finalisation
neutral neutrality neutralise neutralisation

There are some recognised differences in word stress which depend on the variety of English
being used, for example:

oOoo
ooOo Caribbean
Caribbean aluminum
aluminium (American
(British English) English)

These differences are noted in good learner dictionaries. If words like these come up in class,
point them out to students. Ask if there are similar cases of differences in word stress in their
own language - this will heighten awareness and interest.

In the classroom

• Raise awareness & build confidence

You can use the same questions with your students that I have used in this
article. These will help to raise the students' awareness of word stress and its
importance. Some learners love to learn about the 'technical' side of
language, while others like to 'feel' or 'see' the language more, hearing the
music of word stress or seeing the shapes of the words. Try to use a variety
of approaches: helping students to engage with English in different ways will
help them in their goal to become more proficient users of the language.
Build students' confidence by drawing their attention to the tendencies and
patterns in word stress that do exist.
• Mark the stress
Use a clear easy-to-see way of marking stress on the board and on handouts
for students. I use the big circle - small circle (O o) method. It is very easy to
see and has the added advantage of identifying the number of syllables in
the word, as well as the stressed syllable.

Students also need to be aware of the way dictionaries usually mark stress -
with a mark before the stressed syllable, e.g. 'apple. By knowing this,
students will be able to check word stress independently.

• Cuisenaire rods
These different sized, small coloured blocks are great for helping students to
'see' the word stress. The students build the words using different blocks to
represent stressed and unstressed syllables. (Children's small building blocks
are a good substitute!)

• Integrate word stress into your lessons

You don't need to teach separate lessons on word stress. Instead, you can
integrate it into your normal lessons. The ideal time to focus students'
attention on it is when introducing vocabulary. Meaning and spelling are
usually clarified for students but the sound and stress of the word can all too
often be forgotten.

Quickly and simply elicit the stress pattern of the word from the students (as
you would the meaning) and mark it on the board. Drill it too!

Students can use stress patterns as another way to organise and sort their
vocabulary. For example, in their vocabulary books they can have a section
for nouns with the pattern O o, and then a section for the pattern o O. Three
syllable words can be sorted into O o o (Saturday, hospital) and o O o
(computer, unhappy).

Remember what I noted before: The more times students mentally engage
with new vocabulary, the more they are likely to actually learn it. Engaging
students through word stress helps to reinforce the learning of the words.

• Troubleshooting
Initially, many students (and teachers!) find it difficult to hear word stress. A
useful strategy is to focus on one word putting the stress on its different
syllables in turn. For example:
oo0 0oo o0o
comput comput comput
er er er

• Say the word in the different ways for the students, really exaggerating the
stressed syllable and compressing the unstressed ones. Ask the students
which version of the word sounds 'the best' or 'the most natural'.

By hearing the word stressed incorrectly, students can more easily pick out
the correct version.
 A personalised and effective way of getting students to hear the importance
of correct word stress is by using people's names as examples. I introduce
word stress with my name:
o "How many parts/syllables are there in my name?"
o "Which is the strongest - the first or second?"
o "Is it Emma or Emma?"

Then you can question students about their own names - this will give them a personalised
connection to the issue of word stress, with a word they will never forget!

Conclusion
Any work on aspects of pronunciation can take a long time to show improvements and be
challenging for both the students and the teacher, but working on word stress can be fun and over
time will help your students to be better understood and more confident speakers.

Further reading
Sound Foundations by Adrian Underhill
Pronunciation by Dalton and Seidlholfer
How to Teach Pronunciation by Gerald Kelly
Teaching English Pronunciation by Joanne Kenworthy
Syllables | What is Word Stress? | Why? | Where? | Rules | Quiz

Understanding Syllables
To understand word stress, it helps to understand syllables.
Every word is made from syllables.
Each word has one, two, three or more syllables.

number of
word
syllables

dog dog 1

green green 1

quite quite 1

quiet qui-et 2

orange or-ange 2

table ta-ble 2

expensive ex-pen-sive 3

interesting in-ter-est-ing 4

realistic re-al-is-tic 4

unexceptio un-ex-cep-
5
nal tion-al

Notice that (with a few rare exceptions) every syllable contains at least one vowel (a, e, i, o or
u) or vowel sound.

What is Word Stress?

In English, we do not say each syllable with the same force or strength. In one word, we
accentuate ONE syllable. We say one syllable very loudly (big, strong, important) and all the
other syllables very quietly.

Let's take 3 words: photograph, photographer and photographic. Do they sound the same
when spoken? No. Because we accentuate (stress) ONE syllable in each word. And it is not
always the same syllable. So the shape of each word is different.

stress
total
click word to ed
shape syllabl
hear syllabl
es
e

PHO TO
3 #1
GRAPH

PHO TO
4 #2
GRAPH ER

PHO TO
4 #3
GRAPH IC

This happens in ALL words with 2 or more syllables: TEACHer, JaPAN, CHINa, aBOVE,
converSAtion, INteresting, imPORtant, deMAND, etCETera, etCETera, etCETera

The syllables that are not stressed are weak or small or quiet. Native speakers of English
listen for the STRESSED syllables, not the weak syllables. If you use word stress in your
speech, you will instantly and automatically improve your pronunciation and your
comprehension.

Try to hear the stress in individual words each time you listen to English - on the radio, or in
films for example. Your first step is to HEAR and recognise it. After that, you can USE it!

There are two very important rules about word stress:

1. One word, one stress. (One word cannot have two stresses. So if you
hear two stresses, you have heard two words, not one word.)
2. The stress is always on a vowel.
Why is Word Stress Important?
Word stress is not used in all languages. Some languages, Japanese or French for example,
pronounce each syllable with eq-ual em-pha-sis.

Other languages, English for example, use word stress.

Word stress is not an optional extra that you can add to the English language if you want. It is
part of the language! English speakers use word stress to communicate rapidly and
accurately, even in difficult conditions. If, for example, you do not hear a word clearly, you
can still understand the word because of the position of the stress.

Think again about the two words photograph and photographer. Now imagine that you are
speaking to somebody by telephone over a very bad line. You cannot hear clearly. In fact, you
hear only the first two syllables of one of these words, photo... Which word is it, photograph
or photographer? Of course, with word stress you will know immediately which word it is
because in reality you will hear either PHOto... or phoTO... So without hearing the whole
word, you probably know what the word is ( PHOto...graph or phoTO...grapher). It's
magic! (Of course, you also have the 'context' of your conversation to help you.)

This is a simple example of how word stress helps us understand English. There are many,
many other examples, because we use word stress all the time, without thinking about it.

Where do I Put Word Stress?

There are some rules about which syllable to stress. But...the rules are rather complicated!
Probably the best way to learn is from experience. Listen carefully to spoken English and try
to develop a feeling for the "music" of the language.

When you learn a new word, you should also learn its stress pattern. If you keep a vocabulary
book, make a note to show which syllable is stressed. If you do not know, you can look in a
dictionary. All dictionaries give the phonetic spelling of a word. This is where they show
which syllable is stressed, usually with an apostrophe (') just before or just after the stressed
syllable. (The notes at the front of the dictionary will explain the system used.) Look at (and
listen to) this example for the word plastic. There are 2 syllables. Syllable #1 is stressed.

phonetic phonetic
exam
spelling: spelling:
ple
dictionary A dictionary B
PLAS
TIC
/plæs'tIk/ /'plæs tIk/

Rules of Word Stress in English

There are two very simple rules about word stress:

1. One word has only one stress. (One word cannot have two stresses. If
you hear two stresses, you hear two words. Two stresses cannot be one
word. It is true that there can be a "secondary" stress in some words. But a
secondary stress is much smaller than the main [primary] stress, and is
only used in long words.)

2. We can only stress vowels, not consonants.

Here are some more, rather complicated, rules that can help you understand where to put the
stress. But do not rely on them too much, because there are many exceptions. It is better to try
to "feel" the music of the language and to add the stress naturally.

1 Stress on first syllable

rule example

Most 2-syllable PRESent, EXport, CHIna,

nouns TAble

Most 2-syllable PRESent, SLENder, CLEVer,

adjectives HAPpy

2 Stress on last syllable

rule example
Most 2-syllable to preSENT, to exPORT, to deCIDE,
verbs to beGIN

There are many two-syllable words in English whose meaning and class change with a change
in stress. The word present, for example is a two-syllable word. If we stress the first syllable,
it is a noun (gift) or an adjective (opposite of absent). But if we stress the second syllable, it
becomes a verb (to offer). More examples: the words export, import, contract and object
can all be nouns or verbs depending on whether the stress is on the first or second syllable.

3 Stress on penultimate syllable (penultimate = second from end)

rule example

GRAPHic, geoGRAPHic,
Words ending in -ic
geoLOGic

Words ending in -sion

teleVIsion, reveLAtion
and -tion

For a few words, native English speakers don't always "agree" on where to put the stress. For
example, some people say teleVIsion and others say TELevision. Another example is:
CONtroversy and conTROversy.

4 Stress on ante-penultimate syllable (ante-penultimate = third from end)

rule example

Words ending in -cy, -ty, deMOcracy, dependaBIlity, phoTOgraphy,

-phy and -gy geOLogy

Words ending in -al CRItical, geoLOGical

5 Compound words (words with two parts)

rule example

For compound nouns, the stress is on the BLACKbird, GREENhouse

 first part

For compound adjectives, the stress is on the bad-TEMpered, old-

second part FASHioned

For compound verbs, the stress is on the

second part

Word Stress Quiz

1 Can you pass me a plastic knife?

2 I want to take a photography class.

3 China is the place where I was born.

4 Please turn off the television before

you go out.

5 I can't decide which book to borrow.

6 Do you understand this lesson?

7 Sparky is a very happy puppy.

8 It is critical that you finish your essay.

My Grandfather wears an old-fashioned

9
coat.

1 There is a lot of traffic on the highway

0 today.