I was fortunate enough to have moderated a few Avenue webinars on Poodll technologies in June. The webinar speaker was Justin Hunt, the founder and CEO of Poodll. I have since been developing learning experiences for the CanAvenue.ca project using Poodll technologies and would like to share some of the basics with the TESL Ontario community through this blog post and a TESL Ontario webinar.
Post by: Cecilia Aponte-de-Hanna and Vanessa Nino
On April 30, 2021 people in the TESL Ontario community discussed teaching the English language skills on Twitter. The guest moderator of the evening was Cecilia Aponte-de-Hanna (@capontedehanna). Cecilia is a full-time professor at Centennial College, where she teaches English communications courses to local and international students. With over 15 years of teaching experience, Cecilia has taught children as young as 3 years old to adults in their golden years.
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The topic of syllable stress in English is a difficult concept to teach, learn, or understand. Often it is an error that is not addressed at all. Why do teachers minimize it and learners avoid it? Why are researchers baffled by it? The rules to English syllable stress are unfathomable. Oh, there are rules, but when these rules are put together, there would be enough to write a one-thousand page book in very small font. Obviously a matter this complex is very difficult for everybody to comprehend and creates quite a cognitive load when we try to process stress rules that have been learned explicitly.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics have discovered that stress usually only affects the comprehension of a word if the quality of the vowel is also affected. What does this mean? I for one have witnessed numerous times in English and French classes how misplaced stress causes a second-language speaker to be misunderstood. Continue reading