Low to High Intermediate English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students at a North American college or university enrolled in or in need of an Oral Communication course.

To introduce stress patterns of the English language, particularly the North American variety; provide out of classroom support for students in need of additional listening and pronunciation practice; and heighten awareness of incorrect forms prevalent in colloquial speech.

Only five out of eighteen of the activities do not use sound. In order to make the most of the complete set of activities, you will need speakers, Real One Player, and version +5 of Netscape or Explorer installed on whatever computer you or your students will use. If you are on a dial-up connection, it may take up to 5 minutes to download the sound file from my site and another 2-3 minutes to load it onto Real One. This requires a lot of patience and perseverance, but the end result is worth the wait. :-)

When you begin the activities, you may see a pop-up window that says that you need version +6 browser, just close that window. I have no idea why it pops up, but you can definitely still do the activities.

I wish that the sound files I created were compatible with any media player, but this is one of the drawbacks of free software. I downloaded a free version of Real One's Helix Producer to record my mini-lectures and music because Helix allows you to record much longer files which are crunched into smaller ram files for easier uploading. I would like to find a recording program with the same capacities as Helix, but with greater compatibility with most media players. If you know of one, please click on the feedback link or any of my name links throughout the site to contact me.

The activity set builds on the knowledge gleaned from the course readings for Materials Design (refer to the Reflections page) and my teaching experiences. Thus, they are linked to one another since each activity builds upon and recycles the information from previous activities. In this section, I will explain what went into each activity. They are best suited for self-study, but are easily adaptable for in-class use. If you'd like to make them a little more interactive, I would suggest pair work where the students take turns controlling the mouse or keyboard. They could also change partners after every third activity or so.

Activities 1-7: The first activity "What Is Stress?" is an introduction to stress in the English language, both word and sentence level. The next activity works with distinguishing and identifying syllables in a word. The third activity makes the phonology/orthography connection. It is meant to give learners a clue or hint about word stress that is fairly reliable, much like Activity 4. This activity helps learners identify compound nouns by ear rather than solely by sight. I identified some fairly common compound nouns by looking at the Academic Word List (AWL). I chose words that would be common in both academic and 'real world' settings to increase noticeability of the form and stress pattern.

Activity 5, "Looks Can Be Deceiving", reinforces the fact that one can not always rely upon the appearance of words. This activity acts as a segway into the following activities on exceptions to stress. I did not want to introduce exceptions to any of the patterns until students had begun to feel a little more at ease with word stress. If you teach a pattern and then immediately teach an exception to the pattern, it may become confusing, frustrating, and even demotivating by substantially increasing the cognitive load.

Activities 6 and 7 deal with exceptions to the 'spell alike' pattern introduced in Activity 3. While students could conceivably eyeball the sentences to determine if they are nouns or verbs, these activities provide contextualized aural support. Again, the examples were of the most common pairs of shifting forms which were identified as such in several pronunciation texts (Beisbier, 1995; Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 1996; Gilbert, 1993; Grant, 1993). Notice that the activities are getting progressively more difficult by requiring output.

Activities 8 & 9: These activities mark a halfway point for the activity set. We are moving away from specific items into more contextualized ones. Activity 8 requires students to listen to a conversation and fill in the missing stressed forms. What they do not realize is that they are also listening to some fairly common reductions! Their attention is focused on the stressed words. What is nice about this cloze activity is that students can listen to the conversation as many times as they like and all the stressed items are highlighted once they fill in their answers. Activity 9 is less about noticing and more about recall. Students listen to the lecture and then answer questions about sentence level stress patterns which are covered in the remaining activities.

Activities 10 & 11: Now that the students' attention has been drawn to stressed elements in sentences and words, they might be ready to handle some unstressed elements. I referred to my handy dandy pronunciation texts to locate the most common reductions in North American speech and then selected the ones students would most likely encounter. I used a matching exercise for Activity 10 because the goal of the activity was recognition, not production. I do not want them to produce reduced forms, but be able to recognize them when they hear them. Nowadays reductions are just about everywhere; in chat rooms, e-mail, songs, movies, and TV shows. If students are aware that these reductions exist, listening comprehension may not be quite so challenging. Activity 11, therefore, asks students to recognize the reduced forms of words while producing the appropriate long forms which they will read more often than they hear.

Activities 12-17: We have now spiraled out to the most contextualized kind of speech there is...music. Since so many students have told me how much they love music and how they often study English through songs, I thought that this would be a fun way to learn about reductions and see a few grammatically incorrect forms as well. Even though 'ain't' has made it into the dictionary that does not mean that it is correct! It is, however, a very common expression (especially here in the South).

I figured that most of my students had probably encountered the word, but may not have had any idea what it stands for, hence the song in Activity 12. Since typing out reductions can be very strange, I made the missing words repetitive. If they didn't get it the first time, they are bound to get it the next time around or two. Activity 13 is another activity that is more about encouragement and success than it is a test. The blocked out reductions are almost always the same words, but there are also a few blocked out rhyming words to make the listening aspect a little more challenging.

Activities 14-16 are intended to give everyone a little breather and a chance to work their music muscle. Since the pictures were too large to load into one page, I broke "Tune In" into two parts. Activity 16 adds a little aural reinforcement to the previous visual activities and makes sure that students can truly recognize the different types of music when they hear them.

Beisbier, B. (1995). Sounds Great: Intermediate Pronunciation and Speaking for Learners of English. Boston: Heinle & Heinle Publishers.

Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D., & Goodwin, J. (1996). Teaching Pronunciation: A Reference for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Grant, Linda (1993). Well Said. Boston: Heinle & Heinle Publishers.