VV064 Week 10
Adapted from McDonald, MaryAnn. Higher Education Language & Presentation Support. University of Technology, Sydney. 2013.
Smith & Margolis, 2007, English for academic study: Pronunciation, Garnet Publishing Ltd., Reading, UK.
UTS/ELSSA Centre/Pronunciation Fact Sheet/Chunking and Pausing/HZ 09
Pariser, Eli. “Beware online ‘filter bubbles.’” TED2011.
Pronunciation Practice
1) Read the phrases in the left column and focus on pronunciation. Then try to come up with phrases
with nearly identical pronunciation by looking at the hints in the right column.
no eye dear
a name
necks tweak
grade A
tool 8
sail east
eye mill
tone ale
wee Kate
that stuff
really don’t know (no idea)
something to achieve
after the weekend
heavy cloud
not early enough
keep quiet
I’m not very well
part of the body
end of the second month
it isn’t easy
Stress
- Highlights important information
- Every English multi-syllable word has a defined stress
- Contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables/words important
a) Syllable stress in words
Contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables in words
e.g. ma ny peo ple be lieve
b) Key word stress
Stress in longer speech “chunks,” clauses or sentences
e.g. / that in an increasingly globalized world /
c) Focus word stress
the syllable in the stressed word which has the strongest pitch change in a speech chunk
↘ ↗
e.g. / that in an increasingly globalized world / ….
2) Practice reading the following paragraph, placing stress on the words in bold.
While word stress is decided by language rules and can be thought of as ‘pronunciation fact’, sentence
stress is decided by speaker choice. The speaker usually chooses to stress content words, which carry the
information and not structure or function words, such as auxiliary verbs, pronouns, prepositions and
determiners, although this is not always the case.
VV064 Week 10
Adapted from McDonald, MaryAnn. Higher Education Language & Presentation Support. University of Technology, Sydney. 2013.
Smith & Margolis, 2007, English for academic study: Pronunciation, Garnet Publishing Ltd., Reading, UK.
UTS/ELSSA Centre/Pronunciation Fact Sheet/Chunking and Pausing/HZ 09
Pariser, Eli. “Beware online ‘filter bubbles.’” TED2011.
3) Say the following sentence in 4 different ways:
I think you’re right.
Choose how you say it:
- General agreement
- I agree with you, but not with other people
- I agree, but I still have doubts
- I agree with you even if other’s don’t
Speech chunks
- Chunking and pausing vital
o Communicate an idea, highlight a thought
o Dividing of information makes it easier to understand
- Speech chunk:
o A word, a phrase or a whole sentence
▪ Pauses
▪ Slowing down
▪ Strong stress on key words
- You can use pausing and chunking to:
• state information
• give an opinion
• emphasize a point
• put forward a criticism
• soften a criticism
• contrast a point
This is a powerful /
but unfortunately flawed /
argument //
The main problem with the argument is /
the lack of hard / statistical evidence //
I do understand /
that collecting data / is difficult //
However / ...
4) Watch an excerpt from a TED talk on “filter bubbles.” What is the point of the excerpt?
a. Then listen to the excerpt and indicate short (/) and long (//) pauses in the text.
b. Listen one more time and indicate the stressed words.
VV064 Week 10
Adapted from McDonald, MaryAnn. Higher Education Language & Presentation Support. University of Technology, Sydney. 2013.
Smith & Margolis, 2007, English for academic study: Pronunciation, Garnet Publishing Ltd., Reading, UK.
UTS/ELSSA Centre/Pronunciation Fact Sheet/Chunking and Pausing/HZ 09
Pariser, Eli. “Beware online ‘filter bubbles.’” TED2011.
So Facebook isn’t the only place that’s doing this kind of invisible, algorithmic editing of the Web. Google’s
doing it too. If I search for something, and you search for something, even right now at the very same time,
we may get very different search results. Even if you’re logged out, one engineer told me, there are 57
signals that Google looks at -- everything from what kind of computer you’re on to what kind of browser
you’re using to where you’re located -- that it uses to personally tailor your query results. Think about it for a
second: there is no standard Google anymore. And you know, the funny thing about this is that it’s hard to
see. You can’t see how different your search results are from anyone else’s.
But a couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of friends to Google “Egypt” and to send me screen shots of what
they got. So here’s my friend Scott’s screen shot. And here’s my friend Daniel’s screen shot. When you put
them side-by-side, you don’t even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are. But when
you do read the links, it’s really quite remarkable. Daniel didn’t get anything about the protests in Egypt at all
in his first page of Google results. Scott’s results were full of them. And this was the big story of the day at
that time. That’s how different these results are becoming.
5) Steve Jobs – Unveiling the iPhone
You will watch two parts from the Steve Jobs iPhone presentation. Watch these parts and focus on
Steve Job’s use of presentation techniques discussed in the class.
A) The unveiling of the product
a. Slides
b. Silence
c. Delivery stress
d. Body language
B) iPod demonstration
a. Slides
b. Silence
c. Delivery stress
d. Body language