“Revenge of the Schwa”: A Metaphor for Teaching English Word Stress in Academic Vocabulary

Abstract

Academic vocabulary presents myriad challenges for English learners (ELs), including the phenomenon of word stress alternations when derivational affixes are added to change the lexical category or “part of speech” of a word. Adjectives ending in –ic, based on one of these rules for instance, always exhibit word stress in the syllable just before the adjectival ending. For example, when the adjective academic is derived from the noun academy by addition of the –ic suffix, an English word stress rule requires that the stress now fall on the penultimate syllable. Unstressed vowels are often reduced schwa, which some pronunciation experts regard as “the most important sound in English” (Kenworthy J, Teaching English pronunciation. Longman, Harlow, 1987). Knowing word stress rules improves learners’ pronunciation, as well as their listening comprehension in academic lectures and other situations where multisyllabic words and scientific terminology are spoken. One way to ease the cognitive burden on learners is to create and implement metaphors for abstract concepts that can aid in presenting simple explanations of complex phonological processes. Teaching through metaphor has enormous benefits in the classroom for both learners and teachers, provided that certain cultural conditions obtain. After a brief history of metaphor and its application in teaching, this chapter establishes the phonological processes governing English word stress and then presents a metaphor for teaching some of these rules. Cultural considerations about the metaphor proposed are also addressed. A discussion of how to leverage classroom-based metaphors in order to boost ELs’ metaphorical competence is included.