Discourse analysis

Activity4. Identify schwa. What is schwa you might be asking? Well, it’s the most common sound in English: We use it all the time in words like e.g. ‘teacher’ and ‘around’. Watch the video recording and give more examples with schwa and practice with your partner
Play the video

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  Weak and strong forms of common words. When you know about the ‘schwa’ sound, you will listen to native speakers in a different way. English is a stress-timed language which means that we use a combination of strong and weak forms of some words. For example, which words do we stress in the following sentence?
  
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  I want to go for a drink tonight.
  
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  There is a call for you
  
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  How do native speakers pronounce to / for / a in the sentence? We use the schwa sound so it sounds like: I wanna go ferra drink tenigh
  

Activity 5 .Why English is a stress-timed language. The rhythm of the language is based on stressed syllables so we shorten the unstressed syllables to fit the rhythm. Syllable-timed languages (such as Spanish) take the same time to pronounce each syllable. Here’s in the video an explanation which might explain why you speak English like a robot or watch this f clip here.
RHYTHM
When we listen to a stretch of spoken English discourse, we often feel that there is a rhythm or regularity to it, which gives it a characteristic sound, different from other languages and not always well-imitated by foreign learners. The impression of rhythm may arise out of a feeling of alternation between strong and weak 'beats' in various patterned recurrences:
/ _ __ / ___ /
Most of the people were visitors.
Imagine contexts for these utterances and then mark them with / for stressed beats and - for unstressed beats:

1. 
   What's the matter with Mary?
   
2. 
   I knew she would come in the end.
   
3. 
   Put salt on those chips if you want to.
   
4. 
   He works on a farm, doesn't he?