An Old Woman

An old woman grabs hold of your sleeve and tags along. She wants a fty paise coin. She says she will take you to the horseshoe shrine. You've seen it already. She hobbles along anyway and tightens her grip on your shirt. She won't let you go. You know how old women are. They stick to you like a burr. You turn around and face her with an air of nality. You want to end the farce. When you hear her say, What else can an old woman do on hills as wretched as these?' You look right at the sky. Clear through the bullet holes she has for her eyes. And as you look on the cracks that begin around her eyes spread beyond her skin. And the hills crack. And the temples crack. And the sky falls with a plateglass clatter around the shatter proof crone who stands alone. And you are reduced to so much small change in her hand.

Fluency, rhythm and intonation

A top-down look at English

Arun Kolatkar

Starting from the top

Fluency, rhythm and intonation: the overall structures of language sound Does it make sense to start by focusing on these large structures rather than on individual sounds?
We are probably more used to thinking bottom-up, particularly concerning sounds The overall structures obviously depend on the smaller units: it is difficult to become fluent without knowing how to pronounce the individual sounds

Starting from the top

Pronunciation is in many ways the one area where we are most dependent on thinking wholeness from the very beginning
Working with vocabulary, we will usually have a gradual and (to some extent) controlled introduction of new words Working with grammar, starting with a few simple structures and then introducing more and more complicated ones is at least an option Controlling the teaching material on pronunciation criteria (using only words with sounds which has been specifically taught) is hardly an option We must often let the children start with the tools they already have (their Norwegian sound system), and adjust it gradually As a counterweight to this, it is useful to have them listen to and think about what English spoken language sounds like overall (in manageable chunks) from the very beginning

The structure of the workshop

1. Fluency 2. Stress and rhythm 3. Intonation
I will at times put in bits of text written in phonemic symbols: you do not have to read these to follow my points, so this is primarily meant to make you used to seeing them

The structure of the workshop

1. Fluency 2. Stress and rhythm 3. Intonation
I will at times put in bits of text written in phonemic symbols: you do not have to read these to follow my points, so this is primarily meant to make you used to seeing them

Fluency
Fluency in pronunciation is about the ability to speak at a suitable speed without too much hesitation and false starts In this sense all skills in (oral) language get together in fluency: pronunciation of individual sounds, vocabulary, grammar, rhythm, intonation BUT: we cannot wait until everything else is in place before we start focusing on fluency It must be in focus from the beginning

Fluency
Fluency training training which focuses on producing connected speech at natural speed Part of this must be focused on unplanned communication conversation training However, training rhythm and intonation are also central elements in fluency training

Stress
In speech, some syllables will be pronounced with greater force they are stressed: Tension /"tenSn/ Perform /p@"fO:m/ If you look in a dictionary, the vertical line which marks stress is placed before the first phoneme

Word stress
Where does the stress go in a word spoken in isolation (word stress) In relation to natural speech, word stress tells us where the stress may come, but it does not have to come anywhere in the word: not every word is stressed in natural speech.