Fluency, rhythm and

intonation
A top-down look at English
 Starting from the top
• Fluency, rhythm and intonation: the overall
structures of language sound
• Does it make sense to start by focusing on these
large structures rather than on individual
sounds?
– We are probably more used to thinking bottom-up,
particularly concerning sounds
– The overall structures obviously depend on the
smaller units: it is difficult to become fluent without
knowing how to pronounce the individual sounds
• However, communicative language
teaching means that we want to present
the pupils with texts that have meaning to
them from the very beginning (such as
songs and rhymes)
• This means that rhythm, intonation and
fluency are factors that in the teaching we
do will be there from the beginning
 Starting from the top
• Pronunciation is in many ways the one area where we
are most dependent on thinking wholeness from the very
beginning
– Working with vocabulary, we will usually have a gradual and (to
some extent) controlled introduction of new words
– Working with grammar, starting with a few simple structures and
then introducing more and more complicated ones is at least an
option
– Controlling the teaching material on pronunciation criteria (using
only words with sounds which has been specifically taught) is
hardly an option
– We must often let the children start with the tools they already
have (their Norwegian sound system), and adjust it gradually
– As a counterweight to this, it is useful to have them listen to and
think about what English spoken language sounds like overall (in
manageable chunks) from the very beginning
 Starting from the top
• Children who learn their first language start
mimicking the sound of connected speech, often
before they can make meaningful words or the
language sounds are firmly established
• This also means that they have to relate to quite
complicated sound patterns from the beginning
• In foreign language teaching, this should be an
opportunity, not a problem: most children enjoy
playing with sounds
• We need to work with pronunciation from the top
down and from the bottom up simultaneously
 The structure of the workshop
1. Fluency
2. Stress and rhythm
3. Intonation
I will at times put in bits of text written in
phonemic symbols: you do not have to read
these to follow my points, so this is primarily
meant to make you used to seeing them…
 Fluency
• Fluency in pronunciation is about the ability to
speak at a suitable speed without too much
hesitation and false starts
• In this sense all skills in (oral) language get
together in fluency: pronunciation of individual
sounds, vocabulary, grammar, rhythm,
intonation
• BUT: we cannot wait until everything else is in
place before we start focusing on fluency
• It must be in focus from the beginning
 Fluency
• This means we have to find a balance
between accuracy training and fluency
training
• Accuracy training is necessary for fluency
in the long run, but may hinder it in the
short run
 Fluency
• Fluency training – training which focuses
on producing connected speech at natural
speed
• Part of this must be focused on unplanned
communication – conversation training
• However, training rhythm and intonation
are also central elements in fluency
training
 Stress
• In speech, some syllables will be
pronounced with greater force – they are
stressed:
Tension 
Per’form 
• If you look in a dictionary, the vertical line
which marks stress is placed before the
first phoneme
• We can look at stress in two ways:
– Word stress
– Sentence stress
 Word stress
• Where does the stress go in a word
spoken in isolation (word stress)
• In relation to natural speech, word stress
tells us where the stress may come, but it
does not have to come anywhere in the
word: not every word is stressed in natural
speech.
 Sentence stress
• Sentence stress: the syllables in an actual,
spoken sentence which receive stress.
• Syllables that receive stress when a word is
pronounced in isolation will often lose it in
connected speech
– our 
– If you think our ‘car’s dirty, you ought to see our
‘house.

 More on word stress
• Getting word stress right is important in order for
our words to be understood by the listener
• Stress on the wrong syllable is more likely to
cause misunderstanding than the use of a wrong
sound
• In two-syllable words, stress is normally on the
first syllable.
• In words of Three or more syllables, stress tends
to come on the second- or third last syllable
 Where would you put the stress in
the following words?
• Participation Claustrophobia
• Neutrality Potential
• Philosopher Necessity
• Inform Intonation
• Dialect Horseradish
• Outgun Uncool
 Sentence Stress
• While word stress is simply a part of the
pronunciation of a word, sentence stress is
connected to the meaning we want to express.
• In connected speech only the words most
important to the content of the sentence will
receive stress.
– These tend to be the content words or lexical words:
nouns, verbs (not auxiliaries), adjectives, adverbs.
– The other words are known as form words or
grammatical words: auxiliaries, articles,
prepositions, conjunctions etc., will normally be
unstressed in a sentence.
• The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables
are very important in English (think poetry):
• English is fundamentally stress-timed, not
syllable timed.
• The length it takes to pronounce a sentence
depends on the number of stressed
syllables, not the total number of syllables.
• This is the same in Norwegian, but remember:
some of our students may have a background
from a language which is fundamentally
different: where all syllables are the same length
 – In’variably ‘rude (5 syllables)
– ‘Very ‘rude (3 syllables)
– I have ‘heard your ‘excuses (7 syllables)
– I won’t ‘listen to any more of your silly ‘excuses (15
syllables)
• The two phrases in these pairs should take
approximately the same time
• The unstressed syllables are pronounced very
quickly, and therefore tend to be reduced
 Your tools for teaching rhythm
• Probably your most important tool is your
own pronunciation: make sure that you
use rhythm and weak forms appropriately
• However, there are many types of
exercises which are appropriate for this
purpose, e.g.
– Rhymes, poems, songs
– Growing sentences
– Forward- and back-chaining
 Nursery rhymes/children’s rhymes
• Clear rhythmic pattern
• Rhymed lines – easy to remember
• Often used as part of skipping games – further
emphasis on rhythm
• May help the speaker achieve a natural
speaking speed, which also makes it more
natural to get the weak forms right
– Of course, the rhythm in such verses tends to be
exaggerated, but this exaggeration is likely to be
automatically evened out in real speech
 Childrens rhymes
Georgie Porgie pudding and pie
Kissed the girls and made them cry
When the boys came out to play
Georgie Porgie ran away!
(Note how the number of syllables in
”pudding and” forces each syllable to be
shortened)
 Older children
• When the children become too big for traditional nursery
rhymes, there are other types of rhythmic poetry that can
be used – or there are of course twists on (or twisted
versions of) the rhymes they already know (if you want to
subject children to such brutality):
• Mary had a little lamb
Tommy had a pup
Alfonzo had a crocodile
That ate the others up
• Mary had a little lamb
You've heard this tale before
But did you know she passed her plate
And had a little more
 Limericks
• Again, the clear rhythm makes these a useful tool.
There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside
And the smile on the face of the tiger

Here the strict form also means that students can produce these
themselves
 Growing Sentences
• A sentence begins with the most important content words, and id
then expanded, mainly with function words. The number of stresses,
and therefore the time it takes, remains unchanged, and the added
words are likely to be unstressed; many of them weak forms.

• Clyde robbed banks

• Bonnie and Clyde robbed banks
• Bonnie and Clyde must have robbed the banks
• Bonnie and Clyde must have been robbed by the banks
• Bonnie and Clyde must have been robbed by the greedy banks
 Forward-chaining:

• Building a sentence by beginning at the first word and then adding

new items – noticing how the rhythm changes. Note that the focus
of the sentences keeps moving, since the most important item of
information tends to come last

• Priscilla
• Priscilla played
• Priscilla played the lead role
• Priscilla played the lead role in an amateur production
• Priscilla played the lead role in an amateur production of “Twelfth
Night”.
• Priscilla played the lead role in an amateur production of “Twelfth
Night” which was an enormous success.
 Back-chaining

• Note how with back-chaining the focus of the

sentence – and thus the intonation pattern –
stays the same:
– Restaurant
– Really nice restaurant
– At a really nice restaurant
– Dinner at a really nice restaurant
– Bought me dinner at a really nice restaurant
– My aunt bought me dinner at a really nice restaurant
– Strangely enough, my aunt bought me dinner at a
really nice restaurant.
 Finding rhythmic patterns
• Mark likely full stresses in the following list and group the
words or sentences into four groups of four, so that each
group has the same stress pattern. Then transcribe all
the sets
• Consideration Remember
• Terminology Banana
• I met some artists Nevertheless
• We left her Electricity
• Merry-go-round Characteristic
• So you lost again Let’s face it
• He’s a countryman Jack-in-the-box
• Under the window They ought to know
 Intonation is:
• “Continuous changing of the pitch (tone) of
the speaker’s voice to express meanings”
(Bradford)
• It is linked to rhythm, because rhythm and
stress decides where we get pitch-
changes
 Changes in pitch that express
meaning:
• Pitch changes are not used in English to
distinguish between words with different
basic meaning, as it is used extensively in
e.g. Chinese (and even in Norwegian to a
much smaller extent: håpet vs. håpe.)
• They are used to mark the communicative
function of an utterance (is it a question or
a statement?) and to mark emotional
attitude.
• This may well be the psychologically most
difficult part of language to copy for foreign
speakers – it may also feel like giving up
part of your personality.
• It is important to keep ears open, observe
and copy.
 General points on English
intonation
• Pitch within an utterance tends to start low and
be kept low until the first stressed syllable (if the
first syllable in the utterance is stressed, we will
start off at a high pitch level).
• The first stressed syllable usually jumps to a
higher pitch
• The pitch then tends to stay on a high and fairly
even level
• At the main communicative focus of the
sentence, the stressed syllable will have a glide
either up or down.
• The communicative focus of an English
sentence tends to lie towards the end
• If the focus moves towards the front, this
needs a more special context to be natural
• The main pitch change will therefore also
lie towards the end
 Where would the main stress
naturally go? What happens if we
move it?
• I always take the bus.
• Would you like some tea?
• We first met them in France.
• I thought John had fixed that.
• Can you hear that strange noise?
• Note particularly that the pitch tends to stay even
(and relatively high) from the first stressed
syllable until the tonic syllable
• In Norwegian, every stressed syllable tends to
be emphasised by a pitch-change from the
speaking tone, but this is not the case in English
– stressed syllables except for the first one and
the tonic one tend to have the same pitch as the
surrounding unstressed ones.
• Two points we should think about when
we speak English (or try to teach it to
others) are
– Keeping the speaking tone from the first
stress to the main focus of a meaning unit
high and relatively even
– Having a clear focus of each spoken unit,
marked by a clear pitch-change
 Chunking
• Rhythm and intonation come together in
the concept of ”chunking”
• Breaking your spoken language into
manageable ”chunks”
• If you make them too short, fluency will
suffer
• If the chunks become too long, intonation
will become flat and difficult to follow