What makes english a stressed timed language

Any vowel in an unstressed syllable can become a schwa sound. One word has two schwas — can you hear them? Check out this post on short u , and this post on the schwa sound to learn more, and to hear and practice the difference. This is why it is so important to listen to spoken English! There are a few rules to help you find the stressed syllables in a word, but the best and easiest way is for you to hear the word spoken. Leave a comment below and tell me what you think!

We also always say one syllable the loudest inside one word, which is known as ' word stress '. Sometimes more than one syllable is stressed, but there's always one that's the strongest.

This syllable must have a vowel sound we can't stress only consonants in English. You can see word stress here:. In a stress-timed language like English, the distance between stressed syllables is usually similar.

In other words, the stressed syllables have a regular 'beat' and happen at a similar speed. As you can see, anything that isn't stressed has to be squashed into the space between the stressed syllables, whether there are a few syllables like in the first sentence 'to get a' or double that amount like in the second sentence 'don't you come and have a'.

These groups of words will take the same amount of time. It's possible to do this because in spoken English, we often make the unstressed syllables very small, or 'reduced', allowing us to fit more in, but this doesn't happen in other languages like Chinese Mandarin and Cantonese , Arabic, Vietnamese, Korean, Turkish, or Spanish. This is why English speakers might not understand you when you're speaking 'clearly' by pronouncing everything correctly.

Has this ever happened to you? Keep reading! For all language learners, it's important to know about the following:. Good question. First, we'll consider what's important to remember in general, particularly if you have a syllabic-timed language background.

You can also practise syllable stress making one syllable in a word louder than the others and individual English sounds in free phone apps like SpeakAP or ProPower , as shown below. Free apps like these are helpful for practising syllable stress and individual sounds in English.

You can also practise by getting a talk with a transcript, like a talk from TED. You can then read it to someone like a Study Support Teacher and get feedback. Pop songs are also useful resources for practising pronunciation, because songs are easy for brain to catch on to and they exaggerate many of the spoken English features. This chart can help you identify and work on individual sounds in English.

It can also help you read the way a word should sound if you're not sure because this is how dictionaries will show the pronunciation. Most of the previously listed apps and software programs use it, too. You can find the chart easily by searching, or just open your e-course on Blackboard screenshot below. Now it's time to practise! Post below if you have any questions or feedback.

Want more ideas? Want to learn more about the pathways programs available? RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.

Moreover, as others have pointed out Collins and Mees, , the Englishes of the West Indies, of many parts of Africa, and of the Indian subcontinent, have been influenced by the syllable-timing of their local languages and are more syllable-timed than stress-timed. So where does this leave us as practitioners? Well, as always, that rather depends on what your students need. And good luck to them! In contrast, work on gaining productive competence in stress-timing always assuming such a thing exists would not be a good use of classroom time for students whose target is international intelligibility.

Partly this is because stress—timing is not necessary for intelligibility in ELF contexts. More importantly, however, the connected speech features of native-speaker pronunciation that come together to generate a stress-timed rhythm schwa, vowel reduction, weak forms, linking, assimilation, elision and coalescence , can — individually or in combination — have a negative impact on ELF intelligibility. Oh dear!

Gone are the chants and the songs. Gone are the endless humorous limericks. Gone is all the fun! God, I hate ELF! Except… Did you spot this one coming, too? Except, that there is a part of rhythm that does need attending to both for NS—oriented goals, and for international intelligibility. And that is nuclear stress.

Nuclear stress also referred to as tonic stress, and in most coursebooks as sentence stress is essential in the construction of meaning in English. Many languages, however, are syllable-timed, which means each syllable has the same length. Examples of syllable-timed languages: French, Spanish, Cantonese. So, when an American hears a sentence of English, with each syllable having the same length, it takes just a little bit longer to get the meaning.

Our ears, our brains, go straight to those words. Those are the content words. So this is why stress is so important in American English.