/ɒv/: What do you mean?
/əv/: I can see it in your eyes, you're jealous again.
/ɒv/: I'm not, it's just that... you get so much more work than me.
/əv/: I can't help it, us prepositions are really useful.
/ɒv/: But I'm a preposition too!
/əv/: Stop whining, you're meant to be the strong one.
/ɒv/: And your supposed to be weak, but if I don't get any work soon I may have to consider...
/əv/: Don't say it /ɒv/!
/ɒv/: ...getting a fake schwa.
/əv/: Oh /ɒv/!
Ok, so it's unlikely that I'll ever make it as a script writer but you've hopefully gleaned from this short dialogue that strong forms do not occur as often as weak forms in English. Why then, do we insist on telling our students that 'of' is pronounced /ɒv/?
In my experience, students aren't too keen on pronouncing the schwa /ə/. What's more, teaching the production of this phoneme causes even more problems since learners then do the exact opposite of what you want by focussing on the little beggar!
Now, I know that it's not all about the schwa but I'm not going to waste time with a list of weak forms, there are plenty of books dealing with this - my personal fave: Advanced Pronunciation in Use - Chapter 21.
What I want to go through is a couple of methods for teaching weak forms. Both deal with ignoring the weak forms and focusing on sentence stress.
Exercise 1
Read the four points below and get your students to copy your rhythm:
1. Chicken, turkey, duck, goose.
2. Chicken and turkey and duck and goose.
3. A chicken and a turkey and a duck and a goose.
4. A chicken and then a turkey and then a duck and then a goose.
If you read at a steady rate, the weak forms can be easily inserted without changing the length of each sentence. You can do this with any sentence by keeping the focus on the stressed words. For example:
1. Cooking, family, Christmas break.
2. I'm cooking for my family over the Christmas break.
I always get my students to repeat the first sentence three times. Make sure they don't rush this, tap the rhythm out on the table as they do it. Then practise the full sentence with them a few times until they sound natural.
Exercise 2
Another exercise is to read some target sentences and get your students to write down only the stressed words in each one. After they've done this and you've checked them, repeat steps one and two above. If possible, do this without giving them a copy of the full sentence. I find that seeing the whole sentence often undoes all your good work.
Example:
- I'll be making some mince pies this weekend.
- Student (hopefully) writes: 'making, mince pies, weekend'
- Get them to repeat this a few times then model the full sentence again and get them to repeat.
Let me know how you get on!
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