Dropping Keys

Background:  “Phonetics and Phonology II” is a continuation of the “Phonetics and Phonology I” course and is taught the following semester. Therefore the majority of the students in this course are the same students I had in “Phonetics and Phonology I” last semester. I have four new students who took “Phonetics and Phonology I” with a different professor over a year ago.  All students are still in their third year of the English major. The primary focus of both courses is to develop the students’ speaking and listening skills through drawing their attention to various segmental and suprasegmental features of spoken English. This course is optional and can be taken as an elective if the students choose to do so.  Topics include: sentence stress, intonation, connected speech, and rhythm.

The students in this class are fairly young ranging from 17-24yrs old. The vast majority of the students have no experience teaching and not all students even want to be teachers. Their proficiency levels vary greatly from basic beginner to advanced, but the majority fall within the intermediate range. Overall, the students have a good attitude towards English and work hard during class. Getting student participation is usually not difficult.

Dividing one’s ideas into logical thought groups isn’t normally difficult for most English learners. However, understanding the connection between thought groups and other aspects of English pronunciation can be more difficult. Ultimately the understanding of thought groups helps students understand how English rhythm works and how to maintain that rhythm.

Issue:  My primary goal in this lesson is to make a clear connection (and distinction) between the topics students have studied so far in the course and the topics to come in the next few lessons. This is the first lesson of the last unit of the course.

Narrative:  The class began with a warm-up in which the students had to fill in a chart with information about word stress, sentence stress, and intonation. The questions included: what is it? When do we use it? How do we determine its use? And Why is it important? The students had already studied these three topics in “Phonetics and Phonology I” and so far in “Phonetics and Phonology II.” The purpose of this activity was to lead into an understanding of ‘thought groups’ and eventually English rhythm.

After reviewing the chart as a class we added ‘rhythm’ to the right. Rhythm is the topic for this new unit.  I explained that we were going to slowly work our way up to being able to fill out the chart for rhythm too, but first we needed to understand a few smaller topics related to rhythm. So we began to talk about ‘thought groups’ using the same questions from the chart.

The first questions were “what is it?” and “when do we use it?” I wrote these questions on the board and asked my students to throw out their ideas, brainstorming a little. Then I gave them a concise definition and they divided up some sentences into logical thought groups based on intuition.

Before discussing how to divide up thought groups, we talked about “Why it’s important.”  At that time, I started to babble on and on about a time I went to the store to buy ingredients for a cake I was making (although the topic didn’t matter at all). I spoke at a normal pace but with few stops and very short breaths.  I also spoke for at least 30 seconds straight making the story a little longer than a normal dialogue or comment.  Then we had a short class discussion about how the students felt listening to the babbling and how I felt doing it. I asked if it was it easy to understand, If they could they follow my train of thought, how much they could remember about what I said, and if they could retell the story with details if asked to do so, among others. This led directly into a realization of why it’s important to divide our thoughts up into thought groups. The example and discussion helped the students answer the question themselves, but I wrote it formally on the board as well.

We then tried to tackle the final question from the chart: “How is its use determined?” Here the students opened up their textbooks and we read a paragraph two times, with two different ways to divide up our thoughts into thought groups.  We discussed the understood meaning of the first paragraph as a class and then in pairs the students discussed how that meaning changed by dividing up our thoughts differently.  During this discussion we cycled back to how pragmatics always affects pronunciation.

The class ended there because we ran out of time so I did a quick wrap-up connection to rhythm and gave them their homework. Their homework was to read through the chapter on thought groups in their textbooks to find out how we determine when and where to divide up our thoughts. Then they are to bring in some examples of ‘don’t do’s;’ when NOT to break up our ideas. We’ll do the application exercises next class.

Reflection:  I tried hard in this lesson to show the connection between the new unit (started today) and the previous units before moving on. I find it to be especially hard for students to make those connections themselves in abstract courses like this one because the topics themselves, let alone as a whole, don’t always seem to make sense.  Although all three topics taught in this course (sentence stress, intonation, rhythm) are clearly part of English pronunciation, it’s often hard for students to understand how stress and intonation combine with rhythm to make the natural sound of spoken English. Therefore, I wanted to make it particularly clear what each topic is, how to use them properly, the differences between them, and why each topic is important.

The chart worked out even better than I had planned even though it took the students a lot longer to complete than I had thought and then we needed even more time to go over it as a class.  During this time, I realized that there was still some confusion on some of the previous topics so I was able to do a little review and clarify those details.  Many students also appreciated having all that information clearly laid out and in one place in their notebooks. In addition, I believed the students learned a few good study skills in the process, especially how to find specific information in their notes and how to condense that material into main ideas. I saw that just like in reading, the students struggle with putting concepts together and summarizing in their own words. Many wanted to find one sentence in their notes that they could copy as the answer to the questions from the chart. Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible. However, it did make me feel good about my plan for the day of breaking down ‘thought groups’ by those four questions. Maybe it’d be a good habit to breakdown all topics from the start with those four questions?! I think that would definitely clear up a lot of the misunderstandings and help clarify topics throughout the course. It definitely worked for today’s lesson on ‘thought groups.’

What I didn’t like about today’s lesson was that I couldn’t get through all four questions nor through the majority of the activities I hoped to get through. I now feel a little behind in terms of time.  However, I know today was a “stop and pause” kind of day to get my students on track and therefore I consider it an overall success.  I know it was better to clarify previous topics before adding on new information. It was a great evaluation tool for me. I definitely think that in its own way, not necessarily exactly how I planned it, my students did see the connection between stress and intonation to English pronunciation and briefly the connection between thought groups to rhythm. Now I just need to finish up the next lesson strong with a connection between all the topics!