(SKKN 2022) some methods of marking stress to improve the communicaion efficiency of high school students in grade 12

The content of the stress part is only introduced in the language focus in unit 3, unit 4, unit 5 in English texbook 12.. In fact, students don’t pay attention to the stress of words, so

SỞ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO THANH HÓA

TRƯỜNG THPT NGUYỄN THỊ LỢI

SÁNG KIẾN KINH NGHIỆM

STRESS WITH SOME RULES AND TYPES OF EXERCISES

Người thực hiện: Hoàng Thị Phương

Chức vụ: Giáo viên SKKN thuộc lĩnh vực (môn): Tiếng Anh

THANH HÓA 2022

CONTENTS Page

PART I: INTRODUCTION 1

1.Reason for studying: 1

1.1 Reasons for theoredical side 2

1.2 Practical reasons 2

1.3 Reasons for urgency 2

1.4 Reason for the condition and capacity of the instructor 2

2 Aims of the study 2

3 methods of the study 2

4 Scope of the study 2

4.1 Subjects of study: grade 12 students 2

4.2 Scope of study: practice tests and semester exam questions 2

5 New features in the study’s result 2

PART II: CONTENTS 2

2.1 Definition of stress 4

2.2 Rules of stress 4

2.3 Practice 8

PART III PROCEDURE 11

1 Experimental time: 4 months 11

2 Arrange the experimental groups 13

3 Educational effects of the study 14

PART IV CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS 15

1 Conclusion 15

2 Suggestions 15

REFERENCES: 16

PART I: INTRODUCTION

1 Reasons for studying:

1.1 Reasons for the theoretical side

In the trend of globalization today, the importance of English cannot be denied and ignored because it is widely used everywhere in the world Along with the development of technology, medicine, engineering and education, English plays a very important role Therefore, learning English becomes even more necessary than ever

In Vietnam, as in many Asian countries, English is now taught as a compulsory school subject from an early age (it is officially taught from grade 3 onwards) (Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), 2008), and many changes have been initiated in the teaching of the subject in the last few years Implement multiple-choice test for English subjects becomes popular and compulsory in high school graduation exams, university exams, and colleges of the Ministry of Education and Training

English is taught through communication, student-centred To communicate

in English, students must use both listening and speaking well What must teahers and students do to achieve the goal? This requires many factors in which mastering the stress of English is relatively important.The correct pronunciation of words in English will make English more smoothly and avoid misunderstanding in communication

I have taught English for many years, I find that language knowledge in general and knowledge of stress in particilar only pratises anghd doesn’t explain in high school program Students only need to listen and repeat some given words

The content of the stress part is only introduced in the language focus in unit

3, unit 4, unit 5 in English texbook 12 Students just listen to the tape how to read, then repeat However, Tests, graduation, university exams all have the questions about stress Through studying the results of tests and semesters, Students don’t get the stress right In fact, students don’t pay attention to the stress of words, so they speak evenly, which reduces the effectiveness of communication Therefore, I

decided to choose the topic: “Some methods of marking stress to improve the communicaion efficiency of high school students in grade 12”

1.2 Practical reasons.

With the direction of the Ministry of Education on innovating the teaching methods of English subject under the 2020 project and the changes in the forms of tests, and the focus of the communication

1.3 Reasons for urgency.

The content of the stress part is only introduced in the language focus in unit

3, unit 4, unit 5 in English texbook 12 Students just listen to the tape how to read, then repeat However, Tests, graduation, university exams all have the questions about stress Through studying the results of tests and semesters, Students don’t get the stress right In fact, students don’t pay attention to the stress of words, so they speak evenly, which reduces the effectiveness of communication Therefore, it is essential for learners to focus on improving the effectiveness of stress

According to the Department of Education's guidelines for the 2014-2015 school-year assessment innovation and the changes in the form of tests, the grammatical knowledge account for 60% of the 45-minute tests and semester exams as well as national examination Therefore, it is essential for learners to focus on improving the effectiveness of grammatical classes

1.4 Reasons for the condition and capacity of the instructor.

Based on the results of the tests, lesson plans, assessments on the receptive ability of Nguyen Thi Loi School students and observation of the students’ activities in solving stress exercises related to grade 12 students, the conductor can recognize the difficulties in the process of teaching and learning stress in English with different exercises

2 Aims of the study

The aims of this research are to investigate which difficulties students have

in doing exercises concerned with stress and to provide students some rules for marking accents in English

3 Methods of the study

- Observe communication classes

- Consult many documents, especially methods of study

- Study colleagues’ experience

4 Scope of the study

4.1.Subjects of study: grade 12 students.

The research has been carried out in 2 classes of grade 12: 12A5 (in the controlling group) and 12A8 (in the experimental group) at Nguyen Thi Loi High School

4.2 Scope of study: practice test and semester exam questions and communication.

5 New features in the study’s result

In the study with the researcher’s innovation, the new approaches help students to identify the types of exercises and to communicate better

PART II: CONTENT

1 General difficulties in the process of teaching and learning stress

1.1 On the learner's side:

Nguyen Thi Loi High School is located in a tourist area, Sam son beach, so most of the students don’t focus on studying seriously because of their part time jobs It is the thinking of earning money early and easily that makes them neglect study They spend the less time doing homework and preparing lessons before class Besides, high school students have too many subjects to learn during the school year

The passive learning attitude during lessons in some classes observed by the teachers also shows that learners do not seem to pay adequate attention to self-improvement in the learning process As a result, learners can’t understand and remember the content of lesson

Another drawback is that In fact, students don’t pay attention to the stress

of words, so they speak evenly, which reduces the effectiveness of communication Therefore, it is essential for learners to focus on improving the effectiveness of stress learner don’t focus on enriching their vocabulary, especially, they ignore the stress of them

In my observation in each lesson, learners remember the stress of the words mechanically Moreover, students don’t pay attention to the stress of words, so they speak evenly, which reduces the effectiveness of communication Therefore, it

is essential for learners to focus on improving the effectiveness of stress

1.2 On the teacher's side.

The application traditional methods in language teaching makes learners feel boring and it’s difficult for them to understand lesson

Some teachers, although are aware of the need to change teaching methods, they cannot apply many effective measures to change the situation due to the limited time in class

Some teachers only pay attention to good learners not to bad students Therefore, most of learners don’t have understand lesson and get bad mark and can’t communicte with others

By analyzing subjective and objective difficulties in the process of teaching

and learning reading, focusing on four basic types of exercises: Mark the letter A,

B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the word that differs from the other three in the position of primary stress in each of the questions and make dialogue

in pars or in groups.

The aim of the research is to suggest some solutions to help students do

stress exercises more effectively and eventually improve their results and grades in exams and communicate better

2 Definition AND some Rules of stress

To help students do exercises better, I use some rules and irregular words to teach the stress

2.1 Defining stress

Stress pronuciation is the way that a word or syllable is pronounced with greater force than other words in the same sentence or the other syllables in the word.

Stressed syllables are louder than the others -i.e air comes out of lungs with more power, but they might also be longer, or pronounced with higher or lower in pitch Some longer words may have more than ‘strong syllables’, but one of them tends to stand out more than the other They are referred to as primary and

secondary stress the former being the strongest.

2.2 Some rules of the stress

1.RULE 1 : two syllable words

a)Noun/Adj of 2 syllables: stress 1st syllable:

Ex: student, table, sticker happy, random, courage

Except: machine , event

b)Verbs of 2 syllables :stress 2nd syllable

Ex:

to admit, to intent, to construct

c)Verbs of 2 syllables-ending with OW, EN, Y, EL, ER, LE, ISH :stress 1st

syllable

Ex: to open, to follow, to hurry, to struggle, to flatter, to finish

2.RULE 2 : three or > three syllable words

- stress 3rd syllable- counting backwards

Ex: to celebrate,curriculum, to unify

Except: to develop, imagine, banana

3.RULE 3 : suffixes:

a) stress before CIV(consonant-I-vowel)

Ex: australia, religious, physician

b) stress before IC

Ex: titanic, panasonic, pacific

Except: rhetoric, lunatic, catholic, arithmetic, politics, Arabic

c) stress on the following ending syllables: ADE, OO, OON, EE, EEN, EER, ESE, ISE, IZE, AIRE, SELF

Ex: pickaboo, millionaire, cocoon, analyze, engineer, themselves

d) stress before TION, TAL

Ex: tradition, continental,

4 RULE 4: phrases

4.1 noun phrases:

a) WH - to inf ; whether/if-to inf ; gerund+ obj :stress on the last word

Ex: what to do, learning english

b) compound nouns :

* N+N , N+gerund , gerund+N: stress on 1st element

Ex : river bank, coal mining, living room

** N + adj : stress on N

Ex: a handsome and good man

*** N( possession, material, component) + N: stress on both of them

Ex : my father's book, wood chair, egg cake

4.2 adj / adv phrases : stress on the last word

Ex : the book on the table, the girl standing overthere, in the morning , by car

5 RULE 5 : sentences stress on

* verbs : the last verb

* nouns : the last noun

* adv

* complement

* before commas

* on reflexive pronouns

Ex: I go to school and learn English

I do it myself

8 Word Stress Rules to Improve Your English Pronunciation

1 Nouns and adjectives with two syllables

The rule: When a noun (a word referring to a person, thing, place or abstract

quality) or an adjective (a word that gives information about a noun) has two

syllables, the stress is usually on the first syllable

Examples:

table /TA-ble/

scissors /SCI-ssors/

pretty /PRE-tty/,

clever /CLE-ver/

Exceptions: Unfortunately, there are exceptions to this rule It could be that a word

was borrowed from another language or it could be totally random You just have

to learn these “outsiders” by heart Here are three words you can start with:

hotel /ho-TEL/

extreme /ex-TREME/

concise /con-CISE/

2 Verbs and prepositions with two syllables

The rule: When a verb (a word referring to an action, event or state of being) or a

preposition (a word that comes before a noun, pronoun or the “-ing” form of a verb, and shows its relation to another word or part of the sentence) has two

syllables, the stress is usually on the second syllable

Examples:

present /pre-SENT/

export /ex-PORT/

aside /a-SIDE/

between /be-TWEEN/

3 Words that are both a noun and a verb

The rule: Some words in English can be both a noun and a verb In those cases,

the noun has its word stress on the first syllable, and with the verb, the stress falls

on the second syllable

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll see that this rule is a derivation from the prior two sections and notice some of the same words However, this is a separate section since those pairs of words are relatively common in English and they’re likely to cause misunderstanding due to the same spelling

Examples:

present /PRE-sent/ (a gift) vs present /pre-SENT/ (give something formally)

export /EX-port/ (the practice or business of selling goods to another country or an article that is exported) vs export /ex-PORT/ (to sell goods to another country) suspect /SU-spect/ (someone who the police believe may have committed a crime)

vs suspect /su-SPECT/ (to believe that something is true, especially something bad)

There are, however, exceptions to this rule For example, the word “respect” has a stress on the second syllable both when it’s a verb and a noun

4 Three syllable words ending in “er” and “ly”

The rule: Words that have three syllables and end in “-er” or “-ly” often have a

stress on the first syllable

Examples:

orderly /OR-der-ly/

quietly /QUI-et-ly/

manager /MA-na-ger/

5 Words ending in “ic,” “sion” and “tion”

The rule: When a word ends in “ic,” “sion” or “tion,” the stress is usually on the

second-to-last syllable You count syllables backwards and put a stress on the second one from the end

Examples:

creation /cre-A-tion/

commission /com-MI-ssion/

photographic /pho-to-GRA-phic/

6 Words ending in “cy,” “ty,” “phy,” “gy” and “al”

The rule: When a word ends in “cy,” “ty,” “phy,” “gy” and “al,” the stress is often

on the third to last syllable Similarly, you count syllables backwards and put a stress on the third one from the end

Examples:

democracy /de-MO-cra-cy/

photography /pho-TO-gra-phy/

logical /LO-gi-cal/

commodity /com-MO-di-ty/

psychology /psy-CHO-lo-gy/

7 Compound nouns

The rule: In most compound nouns (a noun made up of two or more existing

words), the word stress is on the first noun

Examples:

football /FOOT-ball/

keyboard /KEY-board/

8 Compound adjectives and verbs

The rule: In most compound adjectives (a single adjective made of more than one

word and often linked with a hyphen) and compound verbs (a multi-word verb that functions as a single verb), the stress is on the second word

Examples:

old-fashioned /old-FA-shioned/

understand /un-der–STAND/

Mastering the subject of word stress isn’t easy, as there are many rules and

exceptions While native speakers do it naturally, English learners have to get there through a lot of practice and repetition

These eight English speaking and word stress rules in this guide might seem a bit overwhelming but they work as references Next time you hear a word or look something up in a dictionary, come back to these rules

Make it a habit to be more aware of what you learn and soon you’ll perfect your pronunciation

2.3 Practice

Exercise 1 Choose the word which is stressed differently from the others