Understanding and Teaching the Pronunciation of English.pdf

important than using word stress, rhythm, and intonation
well. More recently, scholars and teachers have begun to look
for a more balanced approach that helps learners to use both
aspects of pronunciation more e"ectively (Celce-Murcia et al.
2010). As classroom teachers, we need to help our students
learn about and practice both individual sounds and the
overall musical patterns of English. In this chapter, we’ll take
a closer look at the !rst two topics related to suprasegmental
features: Syllables and word stress.

Syllables

A syllable is a rhythmic unit in speech—a chunk of sound
that gets one “beat” in a word. As we’ve read in Chapter 2,
each syllable must have a “heart”—usually a vowel, but
sometimes a syllabic consonant. In English, a syllable can
also have one or more consonants before the vowel and one
or more consonants after it. Here are some words with the
number of syllables in each:

• book^ 1 syllable


• pen•cil^ 2 syllables


• com•put•er^ 3 syllables


• dic•tion•ar•y^ 4 syllables


• con•grat•u•la•tions^ 5 syllables


• re•spon•si•bil•i•ty^ 6 syllables

It may seem that counting the syllables in a word is a simple

thing. We just count the beats, maybe clapping or tapping

along with the syllables to help us feel the rhythm better. But

for learners, counting syllables is not always easy, especially

if their native language has di"erent syllable structure

patterns than English or a di"erent way of counting syllables.

Here are some things that can cause confusion in counting

syllables:

• When vowel sounds are spelled with more than one
  vowel letter or with a !nal “silent e” (read, beautiful,
  make), learners may count the vowel letters instead of
  the vowel sounds.


• It’s sometimes hard to tell if a sequence of two vowel
  letters represents one syllable or two. For example,
  cream (/kriym/) and suit (/suwt/) each have one
  syllable, but create (/kriyˈeyt/) and ruin (/ˈruwɪn/) each
  have two, even though they’re spelled with the
  same vowel letters.
  
  
  • In words with consonant clusters, learners
    may feel that each consonant in the cluster
    should have its own syllable, especially if their
    native language has a strict consonant-vowel
    syllable structure with few or no clusters. For
    example, spring or strike may seem to have
  
  
  
  

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8.1 Syllables and Stress