How To Teach Chinese Students Sentence Stress

开篇：润墨网以专业的文秘视角，为您筛选了一篇How To Teach Chinese Students Sentence Stress范文，如需获取更多写作素材，在线客服老师一对一协助。欢迎您的阅读与分享！

353000福建省南平第一中学陈东容

Why should we teach students sentence stress?

To better understand what the native speakers say.

I’d like to start with one of my personal experiences in Brighton University in 2010. One day in Gary's（my former English teacher in Brighton University, Britain） class, I thought I heard him say: "If I were you, I drink more water." My first response was: That's a wrong sentence. So I blurted out :"No, it's wrong." Gary was surprised and said :"Why? I have said so all my life!" It was only when he wrote the sentence: If I were you, I'd drink more water on the blackboard that I realized that I had made a fool of myself! Actually the sound /d/ is assimilated toward the neighboring sound so I didn't catch it! From this I fully understand the importance of sentence stress.

Sentence stress is the golden key for understanding native English. If chinese students want to hear and understand the native speakers speak English in their natural way, they must learn sentence stress in which some words in a sentence are stressed and loud while others are unstressed and weak or quiet. Otherwise they may make similar mistakes as I did and always get confused!

To better appreciate English literature, esp. poems, nursery rhythms, limericks and chants, etc.

There are many famous poems, limericks and chants which can be read aloud like the flow of music. But if you know little or nothing about sentence stress, you may read with stress on every single word. Most Chinese students know something about word stress, which they learn from the beginning, and they know there is a stress on every word, so they usually have comparatively little difficulty pronouncing words correctly. But word stress is one thing, and sentence stress is another. When words are formed together into a sentence, it is a complete different thing! We can't read each sentence with every word stressed, let alone poems. Because "...poetry, like music, falls almost naturally into small units of words where only one main word is stressed while others are weak or quiet. This pattern of stress is then repeated to give a recurrent and regular pulse which is rhythm" (from: Practical phonetics and phonology). So if you read every word with equal stress, the charm if the poetry is completely lost.

To speak more like native speakers.

Many Chinese speak English too clearly and too correctly to make it sound natural. They pronounce every sound clearly. For example: “hot water”, Chinese students would pronounce /t/ clearly and also: “horse shoe” with /s/ clearly pronounced without assimilation. But with native speakers, they speak so fast that many of the function words or unimportant words in a sentence are likely to lose stress completely or compressed together so that you can hardly recognize them. So Chinese students need to learn sentence stress and imitate so as to speak more naturally although it is very difficult at first.

The Rules of sentence stress:

The basic rules are: