Want to learn how to make a huge difference to your spoken English today
watch this video to find out exactly how to speak with correct sentence stress to
have smooth flowing English speech and to understand fast spoken English much
better so are you ready great let's go
I'm Deirdre Nicholas teacher trainer speaker and language coach coaching you
through either my videos or personal one-to-one coaching welcome to this
amazing channel where you will learn English better and welcome to palm tree
teaching English Academy click on the subscribe button to build your English
fast and improve your English fluency and don't forget to click on the bell
get notified of all my new videos now today's video is the third part in my
five part series about pronunciation and this one is about sentence stress now
sentence stress is the music of spoken English understanding and recognizing
sentence stress can help you understand fast spoken English and improve your own
natural English speech and intonation so what is sentence stress sentence stress
is what gives English its rhythm and it's beat now if you watch my previous
video on word stress you'll know that word stress is the emphasis on one word
our sentence stress is obviously emphasis on certain parts of the
sentence and getting this right can make all the difference to your spoken
English sentence stress is the reason why it sounds like native speakers
swallow their words when they speak fast of course they don't really but it makes
what language very difficult to understand so if you focus on the right
words in a sentence you'll understand native speakers much better but what are
the right words well most sentences have two basic types
of words content words now these content words are the key important words in a
sentence which carry the meaning so in a sentence like she bought a new car the
important content words are bought and car you can actually get the meaning of
the sentence from just those two words country the second type of words are
structure words these are less important words they're small simple words that
just hold together the sentence and make it correct grammatically they really
just give the sentence its structure so in that sentence she bought a new car
the structure words would be she are new so if you remove the content words from
a sentence it would make no sense whereas if you remove the structure
words the small unimportant words you'd still get the meaning so what are the
rules of sentence stress very simple content words are stressed and structure
words are unstressed as I said the content words are the words that carry
all the meaning they're things like verbs such as give by go nouns such as
car didrik and music adjectives such as interesting small and read adverbs such
as quietly softly and never negative auxiliaries such as don't can't and arm
and of course the structure words the unimportant words include things like
pronouns he we they'd prepositions such as on at in to articles such as ah and
and the conjunctions such as and but because auxiliary verbs such as do B can
have must so that's easy isn't it now what if you wanted to change the
emphasis somehow maybe you wanted to show your opinion or your emotion but be
careful not to change the emphasis without meaning to because that can
easily change the whole meaning now let me show you let's take a sentence I
don't think she will listen to him now of course normal sentence stress would
be on on what don't think and listen wouldn't it let's change this I don't
think she will listen to him now that means that I think that others would
probably think differently I don't think she will listen to him
this means I don't think that but I could be wrong I don't think she will
listen to him means she won't listen but others will I don't think she will
listen to him now this means that she won't listen maybe she'll talk now you
can do this with other sentences too and do different exercises like that
changing the emphasis to mean completely different things now what other ways can
you practice sentence stress why not practice live with me I can practice
with you over Skype and my coaching to help you really get your sentence stress
your rhythm your intonation right so that you sound much more like a native
speaker you will improve faster like this than any other way now the second
way you can practice sentence stress is using poetry and limericks let me tell
you a limerick there was an odd fellow named Gus when traveling he made such a
fuss he was banned from the Train not allowed on a plane and now travels only
by bus so if you listen carefully to that Limerick you can hear the rhythm
and the beat in the sentences and you can notice how well the sentence stress
is emphasized one way and the other to really hear the stress read it aloud
yourself or to your students or get people to read to each other so that you
can tell and you can actually make an Limerick yourself by writing one and
reading them aloud to each other if you're a teacher you can find lots of
easy limericks and poems to practice with yourself and with your students and
I'll put a link below so that you can find that link so I hope you really
enjoyed this video if you have hit the like button and make a comment below as
I'd love to hear from you and share this video with your friends
as well now remember that the next one that I'm going to do is going to be
about rhythm and intonation the fourth part of the pronunciation series so I
hope you enjoy learning your English and until next time bye