IELTS Tip #6

The importance of rhythm in your pronunication

Pronunciation: Rhythm 

Rhythm is a part of pronunciation but it also affects your fluency because good rhythm affects your oral smoothness. Therefore if you are trying to improve your speaking grade, this is a good one to work on.
 
Rhythm relates to the speed and strength of individual words in a sentence. English is often considered a stress-based language, often compared to the playing of a drum with its hard, slow, soft, and fast sounds. Some words are pronounced hard; others are pronounced together with other words very quickly. 

There are patterns to rhythm which connect to grammar, and they are applicable when the speaker is not trying to emphasize any words intentionally.


Patterns of English Sentence Rhythm


1. Strong and Slow words

 
Generally, the following types of words are strong and slow meaning that they can generally be heard more easily than other words. Moreover, they tend to be more important in discovering the meaning of a word (ie content words). The following are the categories of words that are often strong and slow.

1. Nouns [dog, house, John, the teacher, etc]
2. Most verbs [run, build, study, jump, find, leave etc]
3. Adjectives (except possessive adjectives) [big, cold, fantastic, strange, many, etc]
4. Adverbs [fast, quickly, happily, a lot etc]
5. Interjections [by the way, say, excuse me, well.., so…]
6. Pronouns in transition statements [As far as I am concerned, In my opinion, etc

2. Weak and Fast Words


Most English words are weak and join quickly with other words. These are called function words. For example, if you say “I am going to the bank” the “to the” will be joined together like one word “t”. The vowels of these words generally use the phonetic symbol Ә , since it is this symbol that best represents a weak sound.

1. Prepositions [e.g. in, at, on, etc]
2. Articles [e.g. a, an, the]
3. 'Be' verbs [e.g. is, am, are, was, were]
4. Auxiliary verbs (modals) [e.g. will, are is should, can may could, have does did, etc)
5. Pronouns (except in transitions) [e.g. I he she you, etc]
6. Object and possessive pronouns [e.g. me, my him, his, her, them etc]
7. Infinitives [e.g. to]
8. Conjunctions that do not start clauses (compound sentence conjunctions [and, but, or]

 

3. Mildly Stressed Verbs

1. Many common verbs that are used so often are mildly stressed. Such verbs include have, had, see, went, saw, take, took, say, said, think, thought, tell, give, gave, find, found and told.
2. Some nouns that are followed by a possessive pronoun (e.g. my mom) can be mildly stressed. Such nouns include friend, mother, father, guy, girl, boy, man. However, they may also be strongly stressed depending on the context.