Teaching Tips

The Stress Stretch for Prosodic Improvement in English Words and Phrases

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Abstract

I’ve been jumping up and down in classrooms for well over 30 years to create an atmosphere in which learners of English as an additional language can find vigor, excitement, and rigor, just as my favorite high school Spanish and French teachers did in their passionate ways many decades ago. But in addition to infusing role-plays, dialogs, songs, and drama into classroom activities, I’ve developed several systematic techniques using movement. The Stress Stretch, which I wrote about as a recipe in New Ways in Teaching Speaking (Bailey & Savage, 1994), continues to be useful particularly for learners who have difficulty perceiving stress and intonation in spoken English. In my teaching career, most of my students come from linguistic backgrounds that are tonal and/or do not have the comparatively salient differences between stressed and unstressed syllables or long and short vowels as English. Even among relatively advanced learners, I have encountered quite a few who speak English with ease, and perhaps with general accuracy in word choice and sentence structure, but whose prosody causes confusion, delayed comprehension, misinterpretation, or misperception to varying degrees. Perhaps you, too, are familiar with learners like these.

How to Cite:

Chan, M. J., (2015) “The Stress Stretch for Prosodic Improvement in English Words and Phrases”, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Proceedings 7(1).