Games for teaching word stress

Say a sentence out loud and show them which word is stressed by representing it with the longer rod. Discuss with your class how the stress affects the meaning of the sentence. Have them copy each sentence and underline the stressed word. Give your students a series of sentences to read. This time you will not be saying them out loud. They must figure out which word is stressed based purely on the context. For instance:. I was so angry at John.

He forgot to call me on my birthday. He said he had remembered, but that it was too late to call. There may be more than one correct answer; differences in which words students choose to stress may be a good lead in for a discussion. Give your students a series of questions they must evaluate. Tell them that they must indicate whether each has a rising or falling intonation. Did you remember to buy the milk? Depending on how it goes, the teacher can do it again with a longer phrase or even a whole sentence or question.

Have them deliver their line with emphasis. Students will more than likely take this exercise and run with it, so the teacher may need to think about how much leeway to give.

Teachers can also assign emotions to each student to have them put as much emphasis behind their lines as possible. These are just some activities to help you with the topic of intonation and stress.

What are some of your favorite ways to teach stress and intonation? Another approach is getting students to find the word in the dictionary and then seeing where the stress is within the word. One final approach is to demonstrate the stress, drilling and getting students to aware. It takes time but they will get there in the end.

Good luck and thanks for sharing. Thank you for your response. Recently I taught my student to try saying words with different stresses to hear how different it is when we stress on differerent syllables. That is half the battle. Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. ELT Experiences. Search for:. Martin Sketchley Post author at. Liana at. Published 25th June Share on Facebook Share.

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