Do you have any questions?
This is your opportunity to ask any questions you still have and to watch the lead academic review some of the key points from the week.
Hello and welcome to the weekly video for the first week of English for Academic Study. So today I’m going to go through some useful tips to help you review the content from the first week based on the questions that we’ve had over the previous runs of this course. So, the first thing we’re going to look at is the learner dictionary and review some of the information you can find. Then we’re going to look at the phonemic chart, because a lot of people have difficulty understanding these symbols, so I’m going to show you how you can quickly use the phonemic chart to help you improve your pronunciation.
Then we’re going to look at word stress, okay, so how you stress individual words. Then, we’re going to look at sentence stress, so, how you place your stress in a sentence versus how you stress an individual word. And then finally, we’ll look at a very quick way that you can practice your pronunciation using your phone or a computer. Okay, so let’s get started. So, the first thing we’re going to look at is how to find a word in the dictionary. So maybe we’ve heard a new word, or we read a new word, and we know we’re going to need to use it in a seminar, a lecture or just in a discussion.
So, the first thing we do is search for the word. So, a really great dictionary that we looked at before is the Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary. So, you can search for that in Google and then search for your term. So, if we want to learn the word academic we can just search for ‘academic’ and it will give us the word, the type of word, so we know it’s an adjective, and then we can quickly listen to how the word sounds. We’re studying in the UK, so we’ll listen to the UK pronunciation.
This is a good example, but it’s very quick, so it’s difficult for us to really understand the pronunciation just from listening again and again. We need to do more research so we can now use the phonemic script. So, this is the exact way that you should say this word, but it’s very confusing for a lot of learners. So, what we can do is break the word down by its sounds.
The first sound we need to look at is this first part here, and we need to make a decision about what this letter represents, we could say maybe ‘/eɪ/cademic’, ‘/ʌ/cademic’, ‘/æ/cademic’ but we need to make sure before we start saying it in front of other people. So, we’re going to look for this symbol using the phonemic chart. So, a good example of a phonemic chart, an interactive phonemic chart, here’s one from Englishclub.com. There are lots of interactive phonemic charts on the internet that you can search for but we’re going to use this one to start with and we’re going to find that symbol.
So, we don’t need to learn all of the symbols, we can listen to the symbol by clicking on it… ‘/æ/’. So, we know this first sound in our word is
‘/æ/’ so we can practice that, and then the second sound
‘/K/’ so we’ve started off and we’ve got ‘/æk/’. Then this sound, is it ‘‘/ækæ/’?
Let’s check, so we’re going to check the sound.
So, we can hear that it is not ‘/ækæ/-demic’ it is ‘/ækə /-demic’,
‘/ækə /’. So, we’ve already learned the first part of this word, ‘/ækə /’ not ‘/ækæ/’ or
‘əkæ’ so then we do the same thing for the second part of the word – ‘/d/ - /e/ - /m/ - /I/ - /k/, ok, so we’ve got ‘/ækə /- /demIk/, /ækə’demIk/. So, by using these symbols and the interactive phonemic chart we can really research how to say the word correctly and make sure that we are saying each part clearly. So, the next part we need to think about is the word stress. So, for each word we’re going to stress different parts of the word.
So, to find out the stress of each word we’re going to look for these tiny stress markers in the word and we need to think about the syllables in the word. So, which syllable should we stress for this word? So ‘academic’ has four syllables. 1. /æ/ 2. /kə/ 3. /de/ 4. /mIk/. So, we could stress syllable 1 and we would pronounce it ‘/ˈækəˌdemIk/’. We could stress syllable 2 ‘/ˌæˈkədemIk/’. We
could stress syllable 3 ‘/ˌækəˈdemIk/’. We could stress syllable 4 ‘/ˌækədeˈmIk/’. But we can easily choose which syllable to stress by looking at the stress markers on the word, so, this is telling us this is a secondary stress, so we put a little bit of power into this first ‘/æ/’ but all of our main power for this word goes here for the ‘/de/’. So, the correct stress for this word is ‘/ˌækəˈdemIk/’. So, you should be able to hear that the main power on the word is this /de/ sound. Ok so we’ll listen again to check we got it right, ‘academic’.
So, we can see now that we have a real, exact transcription of the word, we know how to stress the word and now we need to think about the sentence stress. So, if we looked at our example here ‘the stress in a sentence’
that would be our stress marker. We’d have a stress marker here and a stress marker here, but what we need to decide for our sentence stress, we can’t find this in a dictionary, we need to decide which word, or which words are the most important. So, when you’re writing a script for a presentation or maybe you’re practising some phrases, you need to decide which words are important, or the most important in your sentence. So, usually it’s going to be the noun, or maybe an adjective, maybe a verb. Words like this ‘in a’ we usually squash these words together. So, we might say ‘/ðə ˈstrɛs ɪnə ˈsɛntəns/’ we might stress both of these words.
We might say ‘/ðə ˌstrɛs ɪnə ˈsɛntəns/’ because this word is the most important. We might stress the word ‘stress’ and say ‘/ðə ˈstrɛs ɪnə ˌsɛntəns/’. It all depends on what you want your listener to hear. What do you want them to hear the most? So, are you emphasising this word, or are you emphasising this word? So, for sentence stress, you make the decision about which word is the most important. But for word stress, we use the dictionary to find out which part of the word needs to have the primary stress, and which has the secondary stress. So, sentence stress, you decide which word is important, but for word stress, use the dictionary.
So, the last thing that we’re going to look at in this video, very quickly, sorry, last two things, is how can you hear sentence stress and word stress? So, we can use this site, ‘YouGlish’ to hear ‘how do people say these words’? We can select ‘UK’ and then we can search for our word or you could search for a whole phrase if you like. So, this will now search the whole of YouTube for the word ‘academic’ and you can then hear how people say ‘academic’. We can move to the next example.
So, you can get a sense of how people stress sentences, how people stress this word in videos. But then you can also practice saying it yourself. So, a very, very quick way of doing it is by using a site like Google, or you could use Siri on your phone if you like, or you can use some of the tools in Microsoft Word, the ‘dictate’ tools. So, we’re just going to search by voice by clicking on the microphone and we’re going to try and say one of these sentences.
So, we’ve got ‘after I left’ okay, we’re just going to say ‘became an academic’ /bɪˈkeɪm ən ˌækəˈdɛmɪk/ - /bɪˈkeɪmə-nækəˈdɛmɪk/. We would listen to this and then we’re going to try and say it, and if Google types the same thing that we say, then we know that we’re ready to use this new word, ‘became an academic’. Okay, so I didn’t say ‘became’ clearly enough. ‘Became an academic’.
Okay, so I can focus then on correcting what I got wrong, so now I’ve got it right, ‘became an academic’. So now I feel confident. So now when we are delivering a presentation, or we’re practicing some phrases, we can use the tools to help us prepare to speak. So, we might write out part of our script or the phrase that we want to practice, and then we identify which words we think are key words, which words are difficult. So, we can then add things to help us. So, if we keep forgetting that ‘academic’ is stressed here, we could add a little marker to help us remember to say ‘this academic presentation is going to focus on three key aspects’.
So we might then decide that presentation is a difficult word, people keep getting confused when we say it, so we do the same thing, go to the dictionary, find the phonemic transcript, use the phonemic chart and then mark where the stress is, or we could add some phonemic symbols in to help us say the word after we’ve practiced it. So, ‘presentation’ so we might copy our marker
and decide that it is stressed ‘presentation’ not ‘presentation’ or ‘presentation’. Okay, so we can add the word stress to our script but then, like we said, we have to decide which word in the sentence, or which words, are important. So, we can practice it in different ways. We could say ‘This academic presentation is going to focus on three key aspects.’ And that would mean that this word, ‘focus’, or ‘presentation’ was important.
But really, we need to think ‘what do the audience need to know about this’? We want them to really know that there’s going to be three key aspects. So, we might decide that we’re going to stress ‘three’. We really want the audience to understand that what they’re about to listen to is going to have three key aspects. So, you could use a marker like this to stress the word, or you could just underline the word to help you focus on which words you’re going to stress.
And then we really want the audience to understand what the aspects are. So, we’re going to stress these nouns here, ‘technology’
‘education’ and ‘society’. So, then we’d say ‘‘This academic presentation is going to focus on three key aspects, technology, education and society.’ Okay, so by using the dictionary, focusing on the key words that you want to make sure that you’re saying correctly and then deciding which words are important for the audience to hear, you can make sure that you’re stressing your words correctly, that you’re pronouncing your words correctly and that your sentence stress is appropriate for your message and your meaning. So please continue to add questions below in the comments and we will do our best to answer all of your questions.
Make sure you look at the responses to the questions from other users before you post a question because you might find the answer there. Other than that, have a great week and we will see you for week two of English for Academic Study and we look forward to continuing to learn with you so, good luck and goodbye.
What did you find most difficult this week? Is there anything you’re still unsure about?
If you have any questions about anything we’ve covered this week, now is your opportunity to get some answers. Watch the video above to review some of the key points from the week.
If you have found anything difficult this week you are welcome to ask a question in the comments section below. You should also try to review the relevant steps and read through the comments carefully, especially the ones posted by the course hosts. This will help you to become an independent learner.
Your task
Think about any questions you still have after watching the video and the read through the comments section to see if another learner has already asked or answered your question.If you still cannot find the answer you should post your question in the comments section below and the course team and other learners will do their best to answer your question as quickly as possible.Also, if you think you can answer one of your fellow learners’ questions, why not write a reply?
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