How to teach word stress

Although there are usually also changes in sound, differences in rhythm most easily distinguish between pairs like “thirTEEN”/ “THIRty” and “DEsert”/ “deSSERT” in both listening and speaking. This makes word stress an easy and rewarding topic. It is also an important foundation for points like schwa and sentence stress. This article gives some teaching tips.

What students need to know about word stress

Although it is difficult to technically define what makes particular syllables more prominent, it works to tell students to make one syllable of each word both longer and louder.

Although stress patterns of words often need to be learnt one by one, useful patterns to point out and/ or include in the words you use in such lessons include:

• schwa (the last vowel in “computer”), is never stressed, so the stress must fall elsewhere in words that have it
• affixes like “dis-” and “-less” are normally unstressed, with the stress instead on (part of) the “core word” (“HOPEless” etc)
• words often keep the same stressed syllable when they change part of speech (“aSSUME”/ “aSSUMPtion”), but there are many common exceptions (“PHOtograph”/ “phoTOgraphy”)
• when verbs and nouns are spelt the same, there is often a change in stress between the first syllable in the noun (“an INcrease”) and the second syllable in the verb (“to inCREASE”)
• with compound nouns, the stress falls on the first word (the bird species “BLACKbird”) presumably to distinguish them from non-compound combinations (“a black BIRD”, meaning any with that colour)

There are also patterns about what stress tends to go with what kind of word and what kind of suffixes, but these rules are too numerous and complicated to be worthwhile for students.

How to present word stress

Word stress can be defined as which syllable is pronounced more forcibly, but the concept of syllables is often different in L1 and/ or not taught, so it is often worth dealing with counting syllables first. It’s then an easy next step to go back to the words that they were working out the length of, and this time listen for which of those syllables is longer and louder. For example, after students put cards with words into groups by how many syllables they have, they can split each category into ones which are stressed on different syllables.

Something similar can be done with a list dictation where students race to identify that the list of words that they hear are all “animals”, “two-syllable animals” or (later in the game) “words stressed on the first syllable”.

Something similar can be also be done with strings of similar words that are squashed into a word snake to be split and analysed for the similarity, as in “refereeengineerguarantee”.

Simpler ways to show students the need for studying word stress include listening tasks in which they write words which at least some will get wrong due to word stress problems, and speaking tasks using words with difficult stress like “photograph” and “photography”.

When it comes to illustrating how to stress one syllable more strongly, this can be done by using the body and voice to:

• make small and big gestures such as opening and closing a hand
• beat out a hard beat and soft beat(s), with bigger and smaller movements 
• hum out a word with natural rhythm

These gestures and sounds can then be used by students to help them produce the right stress and by the teacher to elicit it and correct wrong stress.

The activities above are all also useful in the practice stage, dealt with in the article How to practise word stress.