Oral English: separating sound errors from stress errors in three weeks
Fifteen candidates sit a mock Oral English test in a school hall in Jos. Each reads ten words aloud and answers two emphatic-stress questions. One candidate, Musa, is recorded as follows: 'comfortable' pronounced as four syllables with stress on the third; 'vegetable' as four syllables; 'development' with stress on the first syllable; 'committee' with stress on the first syllable; 'photograph' correct, but 'photography' with stress on the first syllable; 'sit' and 'seat' both pronounced /siːt/; 'chain' and 'shame' both beginning with /ʃ/. Asked 'Did Ada buy a new bag?', he answered 'Yes, Ada bought a NEW bag', stressing 'new'. His teachers report that he reads fluently and is confident, and he has three weeks before the real test. He asks which of these faults will cost him the most marks.
1. Sort his faults into types and say which type is most expensive in this test.
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Three types, not one:
- Suprasegmental - word stress. 'development' should be de-VEL-op-ment, 'committee' com-MIT-tee, 'photography' pho-TOG-ra-phy. Emphatic stress: his 'NEW' answer is a separate problem (below).
- Segmental - vowel and consonant contrasts. He merges /ɪ/ and /iː/, so 'sit' and 'seat' collapse, and /tʃ/ and /ʃ/, so 'chain' and 'shame' collapse.
- Spelling-pronunciation mismatch. 'comfortable' (three syllables, KUMF-ta-b'l) and 'vegetable' (three syllables, VEJ-ta-b'l) are not stress or phoneme errors; he is pronouncing silent letters, which is a lexical-dictionary fault.
Most expensive: word stress and the vowel contrasts, in that order. Word stress carries meaning distinctions in this test - PHO-to-graph versus pho-TOG-ra-phy - and is tested directly. The /ɪ/-/iː/ loss is next, because it makes minimal pairs indistinguishable. The 'comfortable'/'vegetable' slips are the cheapest to fix: they are simply three words to memorise, and one evening repairs both.
2. Show the corrected stress pattern for each multi-syllable word and give a memory handle for each.
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de-VEL-op-ment: stress the second syllable, the same syllable as in 'de-VEL-op'. Handle: keep the family stress constant - de-VEL-op, de-VEL-op-er, de-VEL-op-ment. He stressed the first syllable, which no member of the family uses.
com-MIT-tee: stress the second syllable. Handle: a committee meets? No - better, memorise the doubled consonant as a signal: com-MIT, com-MIT-tee, com-MIT-ment all stress the syllable after 'com'.
PHO-to-graph, pho-TOG-ra-pher, pho-TOG-ra-phy: the stress moves as suffixes are added. Handle: the -graphy ending always pulls stress to the syllable before it, so pho-TOG-ra-phy. Compare ge-OG-ra-phy, bi-OG-ra-phy.
KUMF-ta-b'l, VEJ-ta-b'l: three syllables, not four. Handle: say them fast as two beats with a swallowed middle - 'KUMF-tuh-bul'.
Note that these are not equal in cost. The -graphy rule generalises to dozens of words; 'comfortable' is a single item.
3. Explain what went wrong with his answer to 'Did Ada buy a new bag?' and give the correct answer with reasoning.
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The question is a yes/no question whose hidden assumption is 'she bought an old bag'. Emphatic stress works by contradicting the assumption, and it falls on the word that carries the correction. Musa stressed 'NEW', which asserts exactly what was already assumed - he repeated the assumption instead of correcting it. The result is an answer that sounds like a non-answer.
Correct answer: 'Yes, Ada bought a new BAG', with the stress on 'bag'. This contradicts the residual possibility that she bought something other than a bag - she bought a new bag, not a new shoe.
Alternative, if the intended correction is the owner: 'Yes, ADA bought a new bag', meaning Ada and not someone else.
Procedure to teach him: read the question, identify the word the questioner is implicitly doubting, then place the stress on the word that replaces that doubt. Practise with three or four questions where the doubted word shifts each time. The fault here is not pronunciation at all; it is listening.