IATEFL Pronunciation Special Interest Group (PronSIG) invites you to a webinar with Veronica Sardegna entitled “How to NAIL English Rhythm: A Blueprint for Increased Intelligibility”! The webinar will take place on Saturday, 15 February 2025 at 3:00 pm UK time.
Register for the webinar via the IATEFL’s website here:
Abstract
Given the centrality of prosody to intelligibility (Hahn, 2004), it is critical to find appropriate models to teach English prosodic skills to language learners. So far, due to ease of implementation and lack of a better model, TESOL teachers around the world have followed Prator’s (1951) stress-timed model; namely, stress all content words in a phrase at regular time intervals. However, we have known for some time that English rhythm has a functional irregularity (Cauldwell, 2002; Wells, 2006). One or two syllables in a phrase are made more prominent to package meaning clearly for the listener, and the syllables/words in between are shortened, trimmed, or unstressed for the speaker to move faster from the first to the second prominent syllable/word. That is, “we compress our words with some intent” (Dickerson, 2020, p. 70). Based on this evidence, Dickerson proposed the Two-Peak Profile (Dickerson, 2015; Dickerson & Hahn, forthcoming), which guides learners towards increased intelligibility by helping them identify and produce one or two main stressed peaks (the Anchor and Primary Peaks) to communicate the semantic essence of each phrase to listeners.
Primary Peak rules, such as New vs. Old Information and Contrastive Stress, will not be new to most attendees as they have been around for some time. Although we will go over some of these rules briefly to illustrate the Two-Peak Profile, the main goal of this workshop is to focus on the Anchor Peak (the secondary main stress), which until recently seemed to be unpredictable. That is, we will focus on “NAILing down the Anchor” (Dickerson, 2015, p. 189; Dickerson & Hahn, forthcoming). We will apply prediction rules to excerpts from video-recorded TED-Talks and then listen to the talks to check our predictions. If you want to move beyond the era of stress- timed rhythm and learn how to NAIL English rhythm for teaching, this is the workshop for you. Pedagogical and research implications will be discussed at the end of the workshop.
Please note the webinar is free for all to attend, but the certificates of attendance will be sent to members of IATEFL only.