ELI 80
Mary Ryan
PRONUNCIATION LESSON PLAN – WORD EMPHASIS
In other words, teaching students not to try and understand every word when listening
PREPARATION: Before I did the following activities, I had already taught students the basic
rules on sentence emphasis (i.e., content words like nouns and verbs are usually stressed, while
structure words like articles and conjunctions usually aren’t.) I also had students practice
reductions (e.g., ham ‘n cheese). You can use Judy Gilbert’s Clear Speech chapters 11 & 12 for
this. The ELI has lots of copies, and several copies of the tape. I used Rebecca Dauer’s
______________, but I don’t think the university has any copies.
However, you could do the followng activities without the preparation mentioned above. Or, you
could use the activities below as inductive preparation for the above.
ACTIVITIES: These are based on the ideas of Bonu Ghosh, and former professor of mine.
(15 – 20 mins) First, I handed out a copy of p. x of Gilbert’s pretest in Clear Speech. I then had
the class do Part 5, which involves listening to a taped dialogue a couple of times and underlining
the words that are emphasized. If I remember correctly, the emphasized words are something like
this:
A:
B:
A:
B:
A:
B:
A:
B:
A:
food….expensive?
Not
I
You…restaurants
You?
Home
Cook?
Can’t…cheese
Awful!
Then as a class, we look at how if we just look at the stressed words, we can catch a large part of
the meaning of the conversation. We don’t need to understand every word.
(30 mins) The second activity is a follow up. I show the first few minutes of the Father of the
Bride remake starring Steve Martin. I ask students to write down the stressed words they hear. In
the beginning, Martin gives a monologue with exaggerated stress that makes this excellent as a
beginning activity to practice the new concepts. His exaggerated words are something like:
used…wedding…simple
meet…love…ring…dress…do
wrong
That’s…married
wedding…entirely
I
just through
Not
daughter’s
Banks-MacKenzie
married
MacKenzie
honest
bought…house…years
less…blessed event
Banks…Banks-MacKenzie
told…back…affection…nostalgia
hope
Although I didn’t use it this way, these activities could be a good intro to the video group project.
I would also like to use this activity to lead into a lesson on exceptions – when structure words
are emphasized and why – how any word could be stressed for special emphasis (see Gilbert, Ch.
14).