Word Stress Activity

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Task: Making Word Stress Visible

To understand word stress in English, we first need to understand and be able to

identify the number of syllables in a word, hence there is always one stressed syllable in
English words.

Understanding how words are pronounced by knowing which stress is stressed will help
you guess how to pronounce a new word and improve your pronunciation for clearer
communication.

This activity aims to help you to:

1. internalize where the stress in certain words happens;

2. why/if it matters;

and - most importantly - it’s transferable to other contexts.

 Study the following chart and the words at the bottom.

Each circle represents a syllable. The big circles represent the stressed syllables and the
small ones are the weak/unstressed syllables.

For example,
The word “Black” has one syllable and it would be represented with just one big circle
like in the first column O.

But the word “Famous” has two syllables and would be represented as Oo since the
stress is on the first syllable FAmous and would fit into the second column below
which represents a two-syllable word with a stress on the first syllable.

Now, try to match the words in the table above to the circles representing the syllables
and the stresses.

O Oo oO oOo Ooo ooO

 holistic hazardous pillar pure pesticides replace

chemicals compost disappear employees fresh recycle

waste reuse protect engineers garbage consumption

consequence frequent purpose perception refuse project