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How to teach Suprasegmentals - Coggle Diagram
How to teach Suprasegmentals
Word Stress
Examples
: educ
a
tion (-tion), rom
a
ntic (-ic), comp
a
ssionate (-ate), Japan
e
se (-ese), CA-na-da (not ca-NA-da)
Teaching tips:
use syllable boxes or visuals, use apostrophes, colour-code stress syllables, use clapping/tapping, contrastive practice to compare differences in stress, group words by suffix families, use YouGlish for real world examples
Definition
: emphasis on a syllable within a word (louder, longer, higher pitch)
Activities
: word family race (sort by stress patterns), stress detective (identify stress syllables from audio clips), adjective questionnaire game (How adventurous are you?)
Rhythm
Examples
: "She
went
to the
store
." Stress is on content words**
Teaching tips
: use tapping or drumming, teach content vs function words, introduce natural pauses, use shadowing ( students echo or repeat a recording mimicking prosody, record and compare with models, use movement, touch & gesture (kinesthetic), incorporate repetition and recycling
Definition
: timing and flow of syllables of words
Activities
: highlight and circle (underline focus, circle stress), dictation cloze (omit reduced forms), restaurant role-play (practice reduced speech for taking orders), recording and play back
Intonation
Teaching tips
: teach by function (attitudes, questions, lists), draw arrows or pitch signs above sentences, choral reading, encourage exaggerated practice first, use Praat or ElliSpeak to visual pitch, build a tone bank of model sentences to show different attitudes
Activities
: attitude role-play, guess the emotion, "say it three ways" game (one sentence, three modes, class guesses), script marking
Examples
: Rising "Are you coming? Falling "Yes, I am." Flat: bored, disengaged
Definition
: rise and fall of pitch to show emotion or intent
Sentence Stress
Examples
: "I
did
see it." vs "I did
see
it."
Teaching tips
: mark content vs function words, teach new (stressed) vs given/old information (unstressed), use choral reading and sentence marking, incorporate role-plays and interviews, model emphasis to show shifts in intent
Definition
: emphasis on certain words in a sentence to express meaning or intent
Activities
: mini controlled dialogues with intentional shifts in stress, contrastive practice (switch stress for different meaning), free speech tasks (apply stress naturally), drama, role-play, emotion voice line (have students "I can't believe it" with excitement, anger or sarcasm)
Pausing & Thought Groups
Definition
: natural breaks in speech to group ideas or add clarity
Examples
: When I saw him, / he was laughing.
Teaching tips
: use slashes to show pauses, teach students how to break ideas into natural chunks (thought groups), practice breathing at natural pauses, combine with sentence stress & intonation tasks, compare student recordings with models
Activities
: dialogue reading in chunks, script marking with slashes
Feedback Strategies
Best Practices
: mix praise and correction, use recorded playback for self-correction, provide feedback privately or in pairs, teach self-monitoring cues, ask for volunteers
Sample strategies
: fluency line-ups (students practice with rotating partners & teacher checks in), peer feedback rubrics (one feature at a time, ie. stress), use record & review tasks for private feedback
Integration with CLT / Task-Based Learning
Communicative tasks
: are matched to real life situations like phone calls (intonation), job interviews (rhythm, stress), customer service (intonation, rhythm), apology role-plays (intonation), speed dating game (adjective word stress)
Why it works
:
Prosody
: the music of speech- the rhythm, stress & intonation patterns we use when we talk,
Supports
natural, comprehensible communication, listening, clarity and fluency, builds
pragmatic
awareness (politeness, questioning, sarcasm)
Teaching tips
: use authentic speech models from real life contexts (conversation, Q&A), use rubrics and checklists, start with awareness and perception, then move to production, keep it playful and low stakes