AN OUT-WORLD MEETING PLACE FOR MEMBERS OF SECOND LIFE ENGLISH
Pronunciation with Wlodek Barbosa
Last Wednesday (4th Nov) we did two activities, both notecard-based:
1. 30 non-compound heteroaccentual homographs: a list of thirty words of two syllables each. They can all be stressed on the first or second syllable, with the accompanying difference in grammatical category, meaning and pronunciation. Sometimes the difference is simple to grasp: ['accent] is a noun, while [ac'cent] is a verb, but they mean the same thing: "to place stress on something". Sometimes the difference is more subtle: look up ['content] versus [con'tent], for example. Students asked questions about meaning and pronunciation. Finding compounds with meaning difference due to stress difference was part of the homework for next time.
2. Phrase stress matching game with two players. Player one gets a notecard containing 14 sound files with no titles. These files contain audio recordings of fourteen phrases of varying stress patterns. Player two gets a notecard with 14 stress patterns of the [OooOoOo] kind. Some of the recordings of player one match the stress patterns of player two, and some of the stress patterns match the recordings, but not all! This means that some recordings have no match in stress patterns, and some stress patterns have no match in recordings. The idea is to match the recordings with spellings adn stress patterns. This activity turned out to be rather difficult, especially as the audio files had no orthographic labels on them, so their content had to be recognized from ear alone. Students got about half of the matches when time ran out (about 20 minutes). We will finish this activity on Nov 11th :-).
Both tasks/notecards were uploaded to SLactivities. Enjoy!
1. 30 non-compound heteroaccentual homographs: a list of thirty words of two syllables each. They can all be stressed on the first or second syllable, with the accompanying difference in grammatical category, meaning and pronunciation. Sometimes the difference is simple to grasp: ['accent] is a noun, while [ac'cent] is a verb, but they mean the same thing: "to place stress on something". Sometimes the difference is more subtle: look up ['content] versus [con'tent], for example. Students asked questions about meaning and pronunciation. Finding compounds with meaning difference due to stress difference was part of the homework for next time.
2. Phrase stress matching game with two players. Player one gets a notecard containing 14 sound files with no titles. These files contain audio recordings of fourteen phrases of varying stress patterns. Player two gets a notecard with 14 stress patterns of the [OooOoOo] kind. Some of the recordings of player one match the stress patterns of player two, and some of the stress patterns match the recordings, but not all! This means that some recordings have no match in stress patterns, and some stress patterns have no match in recordings. The idea is to match the recordings with spellings adn stress patterns. This activity turned out to be rather difficult, especially as the audio files had no orthographic labels on them, so their content had to be recognized from ear alone. Students got about half of the matches when time ran out (about 20 minutes). We will finish this activity on Nov 11th :-).
Both tasks/notecards were uploaded to SLactivities. Enjoy!
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