Literature

Review and Rationale:

Teaching Sentence Stress Online

Lindsey Kurtz

If it can be claimed that pronunciation seems to be the orphan of second language teaching and research (Derwing and Munro 2005), the teaching of suprasegmentals (generally defined to include stress, rhythm, and intonation) seems to hold a similar title within the teaching and research of pronunciation. The idea that suprasegmentals affect intelligibility is nothing new. Claims about the importance of suprasegmentals to intelligibility can be traced back at least to structural linguists such as Nida (1957): How often we have had the experience of hearing some foreigner speak English with perfectly intelligible consonants and vowels and with standard grammatical forms; and yet we had the greatest of difficulty in understanding because the intonational patterns were entirely unnatural and strange to us. Moreover, we may completely misinterpret a person speaking Englihs Proper intonation contributes a high percentage to the total intelligibility of speech (qtd. in Hahn 2004). Jenkins (2002) included the suprasegmental production and placement of tonic (nuclear) stress in her proposal for teaching English as an International Language (EIL). She does determine that stress-timed rhythm is unimportant for teaching EIL, though. As the intended audience of the website developed in conjunction with this review would be students studying English as a Second Language and would, thus, be communicating with native speakers who expect stress-timed sentence stress patterns, I will contend that in this case stress-timed rhythm is an important feature to teach. While there seems to be little debate that suprasegmentals affect intelligibility, there does, appear to be a lack of pedagogical focus and empirical research related to suprasegmentals. Brown (1995) comments on the lack of pedagogical focus when he writes about his disenchantment with using minimal pairs in pronunciation teaching and comments that writers are nowadays convinced of the importance of suprasegmentals in pronunciation, although the priority given to segmentals in course-books may lead readers to overemphasize their importance (172). Not only does this appear to be true in textbooks, but a perusal of online pronunciation teaching materials illustrates a distinct lack of emphasis on quality teaching materials for suprasegmentals. Of the numerous podcasts for English Language Learners (ELLs) available on iTunes, the Seattle Learning Academys American English Pronunciation podcast series and accompanying website (www.pronuncian.com) was one valuable tool for ELLs which did address the topic.1 The website does provide an introduction to 1 The Seattle Learning Academys podcast series and accompanying website were selected for comparison for the purposes of
this project for the incredibly unscientific reason because I would recommend this learning tool to my students. Sifting through the large volume of ESL podcasts reveals that a striking number are akin to a guy sitting on his couch in front of a webcam talking about English. Any further work on this website and project would require more stringent guidelines as to what qualified as a reliable website for comparison.

such suprasegmental concerns as sentence stress and an accompanying podcast discussing the importance of sentence stress. Of the hundreds of podcasts available, though, one podcast on sentence stress and only a handful of others related to suprasegmentals hardly seems consistent with linguists claims that suprasegmentals are important in teaching English as a Second Language. It is also important to note that while many other podcasts have accompanying worksheets and drills, the sentence stress podcast does not. This omission implies to the learner that practicing sentence stress is unimportant. The BBC Learning English website (www.bbclearningenglish.com) takes an opposite, yet similarly ineffective approach. The small section that refers to stress at all deals exclusively with schwa and connected speech. Students can take a quiz testing their knowledge of word stress patterns, but sentence-stress and rhythm are not introduced. As Brown (1995) points out, there is a disconnect between what textbook writers claim to be truethat suprasegmentals are important to pronunciationand what is being done in the classroom (whether that classroom is physical or virtual). Hahn (2004) points out that little empirical research exists to supports claims that teaching non-native speakers (NNS) suprasegementals will improve the intelligibility of their speech. She then sets out to provide such an empirical study by examining listeners evaluations of the same NNS International Teaching Assistant who recorded the same sample lecture using a native-like sentence-stress pattern, an incorrect sentence-stress pattern and no sentence stress at all. That students identified the lecture with the native-like sentence-stress pattern as most intelligible and the lecture without sentence stress as the least intelligible supports the idea that teaching suprasegmentals to NNSs will, in fact, improve the intelligibility of their speech. Rationale This website was created to give students the opportunity to become aware of and practice sentence stress at their own pace. It combines podcasts with online activities. It is intended as a pilot website and the format may be modified after receiving feedback from target audience NNSs. Currently the decision to include the mini-podcasts as opposed to creating one, longer one, was so that students could work through the podcasts at their own pace and play each clip multiple times in one sitting. The activities are also interactive so that students are actively engaged, not listening passively to a long podcast. The scope of the lesson is narrow by design. As with the decision to create mini-podcasts, the lesson on sentence stress is designed to offer only an introduction to sentence stress. Too much information would likely overwhelm students. The activities presented in this website are manageable in one sitting. Students can always return for more lessons.

References Brown, A. (1995). Minimal Pairs: Minimal importance? ELT Journal, 49(2), 169-175. Gilbert, J. (1984). Clear Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hahn, L. D. (2004). Primary stress and intelligibility: Research to motivate the teaching of suprasegmentals. TESOL Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, 201-23. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3588378 on 6 Mar. 2011. Jenkins, J. (2002) A sociolinguistically based, empirically research pronunciation syllabus for English as an international language. Applied Linguistics, 23(1), 83-103. Munro, M., & Derwing, T. (1999). Foreign accent, comprehensibility, and intelligibility in the speech of second language learners. Language Learning. 49(supp.1), 285-310.