CHAPTER 13
Teaching the Musical
Aspects of Pronunciation
Suprasegmentals: Squishy, but fun
In teaching students about suprasegmentals—word stress,
rhythm, thought groups, prominence, intonation, and
connected speech—we often !nd that the subject matter is
less clear and exact than when we teach individual
phonemes. After all, it’s not hard to get teachers to agree on
how we produce sounds and what learners need to know
about pronouncing them. But with suprasegmentals, the
content is harder to de!ne, and in many language classes, it
gets very little attention.
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to use auditory,
visual, and kinesthetic methods to practice the musical
aspects of pronunciation, and there’s plenty of room for
imagination and creativity in !nding new tools and activities.
And some suprasegmentals—especially intonation and
rhythm—are actually more accessible to beginners than
individual sounds are. It’s easy to hear the melody of speech,
even if you can’t quite catch the sounds and don’t understand
the words.In introducing and practicing suprasegmentals, we can still
think in terms of the communicative teaching framework we
looked at in Chapter 7, with some adjustments to !t the
di"erence in subject matter. (Celce-Murcia 2010) The stages
of practice in that framework are:- Description and Analysis (Introduction of the feature)
- Listening
- Controlled Practice
- Guided Practice
- Communicative Practice
In the next sections, we’ll look at ways of introducing and
practicing each type of suprasegmental feature. We’ll see that
with some of these features, especially thought groups,
prominence, and intonation, context is very important—even
more so than with individual sounds. After all, using these
features well depends on understanding the situation and the
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