sentence stress techniques?

[don cherry]

Hi all. A very specific, technical question here. What do you all do to focus on sentence or clausal stress? I have for the longest time used something I picked up from Roslyn where the students clasp hands and sort of swing or rotate their arms together while saying a sentence or clause, the stressed syllable or word being on the powerful tug of the downbeat. With Covid still around, people are hesitant to touch each other. I have tried different things. One thing I've done is have two students clasp either end of a tissue and do the same sort of rotating/swinging thing. This is nice because the torn tissue is slightly comic evidence of something gone wrong. It's not as nice because it doesn't engage the learner as powerfully physically as the clasped hands technique. I've also tried having each student hold either end of a disposable chopstick. This has its downside, though. Anyway, anyone else have any advice? Thanks in advance.

[Laurence Howells]

Don,

I don't face the problem because no one's worried about catching COVID online which is all I do now... so I can't be of much help. 

I use a combination of getting people to clap on the stressed syllables, drawing the shape on screen, getting students to draw the shape, waving my hands in the air, muttering nonsense syllables etc. None of these have quite the same sense of people naturally working and cooperating  together that the handshake does.

Face to face, I also used to get people jumping or stamping on the stressed syllables : I found that particularly good with a group of youngsters (8-12 ish) I taught a few times in Spain .  It can get quite noisy... 

Laurence

Sent from my iPhone

On 19 Apr 2023, at 04:11, don cherry <hirosh...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all. A very specific, technical question here. What do you all do to focus on sentence or clausal stress? I have for the longest time used something I picked up from Roslyn where the students clasp hands and sort of swing or rotate their arms together while saying a sentence or clause, the stressed syllable or word being on the powerful tug of the downbeat. With Covid still around, people are hesitant to touch each other. I have tried different things. One thing I've done is have two students clasp either end of a tissue and do the same sort of rotating/swinging thing. This is nice because the torn tissue is slightly comic evidence of something gone wrong. It's not as nice because it doesn't engage the learner as powerfully physically as the clasped hands technique. I've also tried having each student hold either end of a disposable chopstick. This has its downside, though. Anyway, anyone else have any advice? Thanks in advance.

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[Piers Messum]

Hi Don

In children, stress is a physical thing: a greater push from the respiratory system muscles. In adults, this kind of push is felt most easily as the action of the muscles around the belly that contract when one snorts.

I'd be interested to hear what happens if you asked your students to make this gesture, to the minimal extent that they can actually feel it. I.e., not an exaggerated 'push' (or 'squeeze') but a just discernible one. Can they then hear a difference in the syllable they apply this to? Do they get the feel that by making this gesture they have made the syllable involved more prominent, both to themselves and to the listener?

Best wishes

Piers

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[Cedric Lefebvre]

Replying mostly because I'm really interested in what each of you has to say about it, but I can't add much myself... I believe it's by far the most difficult thing for me to teach, and one of the reasons I don't teach English 'professionally' (only to friends and family).

I use the snorting/hand on the belly technique to show that stressing a syllable is a physical thing and that it has to do with breathing (yes, a certain Pìers Messum taught me this, as you'd have guessed). 

In the past, someone showed me this with a rubber band. I had to hold each end with each of my thumb and forefinger, and pull it gently every time I had to stress a syllable. First I'd do it silently, then just humming, and finally saying the word or sentence. I'm not sure it was a very good technique, since obviously my intonation in English is still very French! It's the first time I think about it again, though, and now I'm thinking I could try it with students (as I now only work online, I'll never have the chance to try techniques physically involving several students).

Recently I played with the size of the words during an online lesson, to help two students see what I was trying to show them by humming (the humming left them clueless at first).

So, I wrote a series of simple things, like:

Tiago took a rod.                     He took it.

Gustavo gave you a rod.         He gave it to you.

Tiago has some rods.              He has some.

The blue rod is on the table, not the green one.

The blue rod is on the table, not under it.

I thought it was going to be easy for them, but it took them a lot of concentration and focus to get there.... I don't know if this will have a long term effect...

Cédric Lefebvre

Creating Within You a Mastery of French  

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[Roslyn Young]

Hi Don,

I'd suggest that you might get better results for stress if you work on the reduction side of the stress and reduction system. This would mean that the stressed syllables are all that's left when what has to be reduced is properly reduced. 

Piers has made a couple of videos on the reduction side of the stress and reduction system, and you might find them worth exploring.

The first is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRu3Lcl0WIs&list=PL4DXj09icrC8Fwv14wpIvdUOvceoy7n-7&index=4

And here's the second: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1S-7i6nvrw&list=PL4DXj09icrC8Fwv14wpIvdUOvceoy7n-7&index=5

 

Ros

[Caren Lumley]

Hi Don, hi everyone,

Your question reminded me of an article written by Glenys Hanson and some other colleagues at the CLA when we trained teachers who taught in primary schools. Here is the article, on the CLA website: it's now been made into a more digestible, drop-down form which helps to avoid the "scroll of death". It's called 'Helping students to sound English'. 

I often use strokes on the board, and ask the students to 'add energy'. I then add in marks for stressed syllables and dots under the unstressed ones. 

What I've found works well is to also, once the students have worked out a sentence and everything's right apart from sentence stress, is to write it out on the board, and ask them to 'add energy'. I then have them start at the end of the sentence: for instance, if the full sentence is 'She asked him where he got some of his tattoos' (yes, it's a real sentence that came up in class recently), we'll work on them saying 'his tatTOOS', then we'll do 'SOME of his tatTOOS', gradually working our way up to the beginning of the sentence, and adding in little U shapes between words that are linked.

If the sentence is really long and they're struggling with the structure, I also use rods that I lay on the table. Usually I use red rods that I stand or lay to represent stressed syllables, or alternate between red rods (that I stand) and white ones (unstressed syllables). I also sometimes use longer rods (a light green rod = a 3-syllable word) that I add a white rod onto for the stressed syllable. We then use the same technique of working from the end to the beginning. I hope this is clear -- I'll try to take a picture next time I do this, because I'm not sure how much sense I'm making!

I also hum a lot, clap, stamp my feet (or get students to stamp theirs), and sometimes dance (and get students to dance). One final thing that I can think of right now is also a technique that I learned during  workshop with Ros and Piers : stage whispering. It works well with certain students, and it's a lot of fun.

Hope this helps,

Caren

[don cherry]

Thank you, everyone, for the valuable advice, links, videos, etc.! 

I've been looking over everything and will go for a long walk to sort things out. One thing that has occurred to me is, while I have described this pre-Covid handshaking thing as something I do to work with students on sentence and clausal stress, I realize now that it was really something I used to work with students on much more. The handshaking thing acted as a metronome (I would actually sometimes transition from the handshaking thing to using a virtual metronome I'd create by waving my pointer back and forth). With such a metronome in place, I could elegantly and easily simply speed the thing up to lead students to work on liaison and reducing sounds as they raced to get to the next tug on their hand or wave of my pointer. The handshake thing was not perfect, by any means, but I have some classes at my university that are very large and very challenging, and the handshaking thing was a very engaging activity for these students.

Thanks again, everyone. Now for my walk . . .