If you’re a teacher, don’t give your students a headache by talking too much about the jargon, just tell them that we usually choose a word or two in a sentence to put more stress on to help the listener understand the key point or idea of the sentence. If you get asked by a student or another teacher about the difference between sentence stress and pitch, say that, in some aspects, they are the same, in others, they are not. FIND OUT MORE HERE. Okay, here’s a speaking and listening activity that you can do with your students to practice intonation in English and particularly sentence stress, but also the schwa sound, connected speech and pretty much every other aspect of pronunciation.
Write this up on the board…
Okay, now give your students four sentences each with 3 different questions. Ask them to think about how the stress changes as they use the same sentence to answer a different question. Ask them to work in pairs. Give them about 5 minutes to prepare and then choose a few students to ask.
1-I am catching a bus to work.
Q1:Why don’t you catch a bus to work?
Q2: How are you going to get to work?
Q3: Where are you going?
2-My girlfriend is a very smart lawyer.
Q1: Do you know a good lawyer?
Q2: Is your girlfriend a good lawyer?
Q3: What does your girlfriend do?
3-I wish I had a Mercedes.
Q1: Do you have a Mercedes?
Q2: Did you say you had a Mercedes?
Q3: What’s your dream car?
4-I’m not a big fan of watching horror movies!
Q1: Who doesn’t like watching Horror movies?
Q2: Do you want to watch a horror movie with us tonight?
Q3: Is there anything you don’t like to watch on TV?
Does anyone have any other interesting ideas to teach sentence stress?
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