IJELLH Volume 6, Issue 11, November 2018 1550

Dr Narendra Kumar Hetcherla

Asst Professor of English

Rangaraya Degree College

Rajahmundry

narenciefl@gmail.com

Facilitating the Stress-Timed Rhythm of English to Learners of English whose Mother Tongue

has a syllable-Timed

Rationale : It was the end of IV semester, 2016, a second B.Tech student came to my room and

started complaining against his father, “Sir, wherever I read out a Passage in English”, father

says, “You read English and Telugu alike. Look at the news-bulletin readers of B.B.C and you‟ll

notice the difference”.

Methodology:

I asked the student to read out a passage from The immaculate Child by Premchand and

made the following observations.

1. The correct patterns of English word accent were not found.

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2. The correct patterns of sentence-stress and rhythm were not used. „Weak forms‟ were not

used in most places and many „grammatical words‟ were stressed.

3. I explained the difference between the syllable-timed rhythm of telugu and the stress-

timed rhythm of English. In a syllable timed rhythm, syllables recur at equal intervals of

time and in a stress-timed rhythm, stresses tend to recur at equal intervals of time

(Abercrombie:1967, 97). Thus in a syllable-timed rhythm, the stress pulses are unevenly

spaced and the chest-pulses are unevenly placed in a stress-timed rhythm. For example,

in This is the house that peter built, the time taken to say the first three syllables is the

same as that of house that, and it is the same for Peter and built. In other words, each

stress group within the word groups is given the same amount of time (O‟Connor: 1967,

124). There are four stress groups in the example cited above: „This is the 2.‟ House that

3. Peter and 4. Built. A stressed syllable together with any unstressed syllables which

follow it from a stress group. It does not matter how many syllables there are between

two stresses. What matters is that the time is the same (Prabhakar Babu:1994, 23). This is

maintained by squeezing the vowels, uttering the syllables quickly in case the number of

them is high between stresses. In the utterance given above, peter and built are prolonged

and This is the and house that are uttered quickly. The student could understand this

easily when I tapped the table with my pen at each stressed syllable. In Telugu which has

a syllable-timed rhythm, each syllable has the same length as every other syllable and

there are not the steady changes of syllable length which occur in English word groups. If

every syllable is given the same length in English as it is done in Telugu, “it gives the

effect of machine-gun firing and makes the utterances very hard to understand”

(O‟Connor : 1967,126).
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The use of weak forms was explained to the student: the use of weak forms plays

an important role in English speech and one must learn to use the weak forms of 34

English words in order to make one‟s English Sound English (O‟Connor: 1967,117).

Word Weak form

a ə (before Consonants)

an ən (before Vowels)

the ðə (before Consonants)

ðI (before Vowels)

some səm

ət

at fə (before Consonants)

for fər (before Vowels)

frəm

from əv

of tə (before consonants)

to tʊ (before Vowels)

ən

and əz

bət

as ðən

but ðət
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than iː

that ɪm

he ɪz

him əː

his ðəm

əs

her də (before consonants)

them dʊ (before vowels)

us dəz

do əm

ə (before consonants)

does ər (before vowels)

am bi

are z (after voiced sounds)

s (after voiceless sounds)

be wəz

is həz, əz, z, s

was həv, əv, v

has həd, əd, d

have kən

had ʃl

can l

shall
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will

It was pointed out that the content words-nouns, main verbs, adjectives, adverbs,

demonstrative and interrogative pronouns are normally accented and the structural words-

pronouns, articles, helping verbs, prepositions and conjunctions- are left unaccented. For

example, in

I was looking for Paul yesterday.

looking, Paul and Yesterday are stressed and I, was and for are left unstressed.

As the student had a tendency to accent almost all the words on the first syllable,

it was pointed out that wrong word accent, that is, one different from that used by native

users of English, is the most frequent cause of the unintelligibility of Indian English to

native, listeners of English ( Bansal: 1976). If the wrong syllable is stressed, the shape of

the word is spoilt for an English hearer and he may have difficulty in recognizing the

words. The student was convinced that wrong word accent is the most frequent cause of

Indian English being unintelligible to native listeners when the following examples,

prefer and defence accented on the first syllable by Indians are understood as briefer and

difference by British Listeners (Bansal and Harrison : 1983, 96) because these words,

prefer and defence, are accented on the second syllable by native speakers.

Pattern of accentuation

Then the following patterns of accenting English words were taught:

1. Words with weak prefixes are accented on the root.

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Egs. a'broad

be'low

2. Words ending in –ee are accented on the last syllable.

e.g. refe'ree

3. Words ending in –ity, -ic, -ical, -ically, -tion, -ion, -ian, -ious, -logy and graphy are

accented on the syllable preceding the suffix.

e.g a'bility

spe'cific

eco'nomically

es'sentially

exami'nation

oc'casion

li'brarian

vic'torious

psy'chology

bi'ography

4. Words ending in –fy and words of more than two syllables and ending in –ate are

accented on the third syllable from the end.

e.g i'dentify
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par'ticipate

5. The suffixes –mental, -ever, -self, -eer and –ique are accented on the first syllable.

e.g funda'mental

what'ever

her'self

ca'reer

phy'sique

The student was asked to take down the patterns of accenting English words and the

weak forms of the 34 English words, after he was given sufficient practice. He was told

that his spoken English would be recorded after a Week‟s time.

When the student came after a week‟s time, he was provided with the following

text:

Ticket Examiner: Good morning, father Gordan travelling far?

Father Gordan: Good morning Mr.Prabhu, How are you?

Ticket examiner: I‟m very well, thank you. I always remember you as one of my

best teachers. Do you remember, Father that you taught me English

in Loyola College, Madras, in 1952?

Father: of course I do. I even remember your name. are you still working

for the Railways?

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Ticket Examiner: I am. In fact I‟m on duty now incidentally, may I have your ticket,

Father?

Father: Certainly, wait a second and I‟ll show it to you. O dear, it‟s not in

my pocket. Let me check again.

Father: I always keep the ticket in my pocket. I‟ve looked everywhere. It‟s

no use I seem to have lost my ticket.

Ticket Examiner: I shall check the tickets of the other passengers and then come

back to you. Hope you will find your ticket.

Father: I don‟t think I ever will. I remember buying a ticket and keeping it

in my pocket. It has just disappeared.

Ticket Examiner: It doesn‟t matter. Father, just tell me where you are going and I

shall write out a fresh ticket. Don‟t worry, Father I shall pay for it.

Father: Tell you where I am going? How can I do that without checking

my ticket?

(Balasubramanian:1981)

The student was asked to read out the dialogue after he was allowed to go through

the text for a few minutes. He was recorded in quiet surroundings. The recording was

played back to him and then analysed. It was heartening to note that the right use of weak

forms had been used to a large extent. Also, most of the content words had been correctly

accented. It may be pointed out that some of the structural words had been accented and

the strong form of some other structural words had also been used.
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The deviant patterns were pointed out to the student and the correct patterns were

practiced with the help of the teacher.

The experiment was continued for 12 weeks with a number of

passages/dialogues/one minute talks on topics of his choice and the learner almost

succeeded in getting the stress-timed rhythm of English. When the recordings were

played back to his dad, the student toild me that he came out with the comment, “Now

your English sounds English”.

Observation

The following pedagogic implications are perhaps worth noting,

1. The learner was quite motivated and pains-taking.

2. Bits of discourse-dialogues, passages and talks and not isolated sentences were

mostly used for practice.

3. The learner found himself in an informal and cordial atmosphere.

4. The whole exercise of teaching was learner-centered and not, teacher-dominated. The

teacher took the role of a „helper‟ or „enabler‟ who allowed a lot of participation and

involvement on the part of the learner.

5. The passages, dialogues and topics were chosen by the learner.

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References

Abercrombie, D. 1967. Elements of General Phonetics. Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press.

Balasubramanian, T. 1981. A Textbook of English Phonetics for Indian students,

Madras:Macmillan Indian Ltd.

Bansal, R.K. 1976. The Intelligibility of Indian English, Monograph No.4, Hyderabad:CIEFL.

Bansal, R.K. and Harrison, J.B. 1983. Spoken English for India, Hyderabad: Orient Longman

Limited.

O‟Connor, J.D. 1967. Better English Pronunciation, London: Cambridge University Press.

Prabhakar Babu. 1994. A Handbook of Spoken English, Hyderabad: Time Marketing.