How to teach weak forms

One of the biggest difficulties in English listening comprehension is that many words like “was” and “at” have a different pronunciation in their (more common) unstressed forms. Overstressing these weak forms in speaking can also sometimes cause problems. This article gives some tips on how to get students to produce and (more importantly) recognise these tricky weak forms.

What students need to know about weak forms

What students most need to know is that some words have second pronunciations that are very different from their dictionary pronunciations and how they are spelt, and that these weak forms are more common. For example, students might be expecting “than” to have the same vowel sound as “bat”. However, as it is rarely stressed in sentences, it almost always has a schwa vowel sound (the weak, unstressed sound found in the unstressed first and last syllables of “banana”). This weak form appears in typical sentences like “I’m better than that”, with the stronger /a/ sound only appearing in the much rarer cases of being at the end of the sentence (“Who are you taller than?”) and contrasting (“British  people say different FROM, not different THAN”).

Like “than”, weak forms are found in “grammar words” like prepositions and auxiliary verbs. We presumably pronounce them less clearly because they are not content words and so don’t carry most of the meaning of the sentence, and deemphasising them helps the content words stand out more. For example, in the sentence “The pig ate some pies”, you can more or less understand it by just catching the stressed content words “pig ate pies”, with much less need for the unstressed words “the some”.

Grammar words which commonly appear in weak forms include (in approximate order of importance when teaching this point):

• auxiliary verbs, including modal verbs (can, was, were, has, could, do, does, been, must, etc)
• prepositions (than, at, for, from, of, to, as, there, etc)
• articles/ determiners (a, the, some, etc)
• pronouns and possessive adjectives (her, your, you, them, us, she, etc)
• linking words (and, but, that, because, etc)

Such weak forms almost always have the same schwa sound as at the end of “computer”. There are also some examples with /i/ like the /bin/ pronunciation of “been”, but so few that /i/ can be left out of the presentation stage to simplify things.

One reason for putting auxiliary verbs top of the list above is that they are the main ones that are important in production. For example, if students pronounce the “can” as /kan/ in sentences (instead of more like /kn/), it can sound like the emphatic “I CAN speak English”, which is only suitable if the other person said “You can’t speak English”. It also makes the positive sentence more difficult to distinguish from the negative. The same can be seen in “I WAS home on time”, etc.

How to present weak forms

I often present or revise this point when covering auxiliary verbs like “can” and “were”. However, those classes have often come across weak forms much earlier in the course when students have problems picking out words in textbook listenings. Although students should mostly concentrate on picking out the stressed key content words, every few lessons there tends to be a sentence that is so difficult to understand that it is best for the teacher to write the whole sentence up as a series of gaps for students to fill in as they listen again and again. The last words filled in are usually weak forms, making this a great opportunity to elicit and explain the basic concepts above.

Most of the practice activities below can also be used at the presentation stage.

How to practise weak forms

Weak and strong forms simplest responses

Students listen to an A sentence and a B sentence that have the same word in the strong form and then the weak form, or vice versa. For example, they listen to “I could help, if you like” and “Yes, he could”. They then race to show if they think the word is pronounced weakly in the A sentence or in the B sentence, for example by holding up cards saying “A” and “B”. All other words must be different in the sentences for this to work, and they may need other help like being told which word to look out for and/ or seeing the sentences.

Students can then mark the same weak and strong forms on a worksheet, work out the rules for when unstressed forms are used, and/ or make up similar sentences to test each other the same way with.

Weak and strong forms the same or different

Write a word which has a weak form like “at” on the board, then say two sentences with that word in. Students listen to the two sentences and race to show if they think they have the word on the board has the same pronunciation in both (both strong forms or both weak forms), or has different pronunciations in each sentence (one strong form and one weak form). If this will be difficult just by listening, they can also be shown the sentences.

Students can then mark the same weak forms on a worksheet, work out the rules, and/ or make up sentences to test each other with.

Weak forms hangman

Show students a blanked sentence with a gap for each letter, then put the unstressed word’s or words’ vowel sounds above the right places as a hint to the missing words. Students then guess the letters like a normal game of hangman.

You can also give other hints like when you’d say such a thing, other vowel sounds, other sounds in the unstressed words, and/ or what parts of speech the words have. 

Weak and strong forms spelling code game

Give students a number for each letter of the alphabet. Say a word in its weak form, then after pauses in its weak form in context, in its strong form, and finally in its strong form in context. As soon as they think they know what the word is, students write it down, convert each letter into a number, add those numbers up, and shout out the total.