Theme: while-reading skills and activities. Introduction

K-W-L approach

Know-What-Learned, or KWL is an acronym. This requires three main cognitive steps: evaluating the students' prior knowledge of the subject, and assessing what they have learned about the subject. The following are the steps involved in failing strategic reading:

• Have a discussion with Aa about what they already know about the text's subject. This data should be voluntarily provided and recorded, for instance in section 1 of the provided strategy sheet.
• Request that the students classify the data they have provided. Different grouping techniques, such as semantic webbing or word maps, can be used to accomplish this. Section 2 can be used to record this.
• Request that pupils predict what the text's contents will be. The strategy sheet's section 3 can be used to record and discuss this prediction, which should be based on the student's prior knowledge and the categories of information created in step
• Encourage your kids to come up with their own questions regarding the text, which they can then discuss and record in the "W" portion, or "What we want to find out," section.
• As they read the text, instruct the pupils to make notes of any clarifications. The strategy sheet's section 5 can be used to note this.
• After reading the book, give Aa the chance to discuss and document (in section 6 of the strategy sheet) what they learned and how it relates to what they already know. Discuss, for instance, inquiries for which no information was located.
Statements about the position of stress are sometimes affected by the fact that when a word is spoken in isolation, prosodic factors (see below) come into play, which do not apply when the word is spoken normally within a sentence. French words are sometimes said to be stressed on the final syllable, but that can be attributed to the prosodic stress that is placed on the last syllable (unless it is a schwa, when stress is placed on the second-last syllable) of any string of words in that language. Thus, it is on the last syllable of a word analyzed in isolation. The situation is similar in Standard Chinese. French (some authors add Chinese) can be considered to have no real lexical stress.
Phonemic stress
Languages such as English, Russian, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, in which the position of stress in a word is not fully predictable, are said to have phonemic stress. Stress in these languages is usually truly lexical and must be memorized as part of the pronunciation of an individual word. In some languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Lakota and, to some extent, Italian, stress is even represented in writing using diacritical marks, for example in the Spanish words célebre and celebré. Sometimes, stress is fixed for all forms of a particular word, or it can fall on different syllables in different inflections of the same word.
In such languages with phonemic stress, the position of stress can serve to distinguish otherwise identical words. For example, the English words insight (/ˈɪnsaɪt/) and incite (/ɪnˈsaɪt/) are distinguished in pronunciation only by the fact that the stress falls on the first syllable in the former and on the second syllable in the latter. Examples from other languages include German Tenor ([ˈteːnoːɐ̯] "gist of message" vs. [teˈnoːɐ̯] "tenor voice"); and Italian ancora ([ˈaŋkora] "anchor" vs. [aŋˈkoːra] "more, still, yet, again").
In many languages with lexical stress, it is connected with alternations in vowels and/or consonants, which means that vowel quality differs by whether vowels are stressed or unstressed. There may also be limitations on certain phonemes in the language in which stress determines whether they are allowed to occur in a particular syllable or not. That is the case with most examples in English and occurs systematically in Russian, such as за́мок ([ˈzamək], "castle") vs. замо́к ([zɐˈmok], "lock"); and in Portuguese, such as the triplet sábia ([ˈsabjɐ], "wise woman"), sabia ([sɐˈbiɐ], "knew"), sabiá ([sɐˈbja], "thrush").
Dialects of the same language may have different stress placement. For instance, the English word laboratory is stressed on the second syllable in British English (labóratory often pronounced "labóratry", the second o being silent), but the first syllable in American English, with a secondary stress on the "tor' syllable (láboratory often pronounced "lábratory"). The Spanish word video is stressed on the first syllable in Spain (vídeo) but on the second syllable in the Americas (video). The Portuguese words for Madagascar and the continent Oceania are stressed on the third syllable in European Portuguese (Madagáscar and Oceânia), but on the fourth syllable in Brazilian Portuguese (Madagascar and Oceania).
Peter Ladefoged and other phoneticians have noted that it is possible to describe English with only one degree of stress, as long as prosody is recognized and unstressed syllables are phonemically distinguished for vowel reduction.[10] They find that the multiple levels posited for English, whether primary–secondary or primary–secondary–tertiary, are not phonetic stress (let alone phonemic), and that the supposed secondary/tertiary stress is not characterized by the increase in respiratory activity associated with primary/secondary stress in English and other languages. (For further detail see Stress and vowel reduction in English.)
Prosodic stress, or sentence stress, refers to stress patterns that apply at a higher level than the individual word – namely within a prosodic unit. It may involve a certain natural stress pattern characteristic of a given language, but may also involve the placing of emphasis on particular words because of their relative importance (contrastive stress).
An example of a natural prosodic stress pattern is that described for French above; stress is placed on the final syllable of a string of words (or if that is a schwa, the next-to-final syllable). A similar pattern is found in English (see § Levels of stress above): the traditional distinction between (lexical) primary and secondary stress is replaced partly by a prosodic rule stating that the final stressed syllable in a phrase is given additional stress. (A word spoken alone becomes such a phrase, hence such prosodic stress may appear to be lexical if the pronunciation of words is analyzed in a standalone context rather than within phrases.)
Another type of prosodic stress pattern is quantity sensitivity – in some languages additional stress tends to be placed on syllables that are longer (moraically heavy).
Prosodic stress is also often used pragmatically to emphasize (focus attention on) particular words or the ideas associated with them. Doing this can change or clarify the meaning of a sentence; for example:
I didn't take the test yesterday. (Somebody else did.)
I didn't take the test yesterday. (I did not take it.)
I didn't take the test yesterday. (I did something else with it.)
I didn't take the test yesterday. (I took one of several. or I didn't take the specific test that would have been implied.)
I didn't take the test yesterday. (I took something else.)
I didn't take the test yesterday. (I took it some other day.)
Stress and vowel reduction
In many languages, such as Russian and English, vowel reduction may occur when a vowel changes from a stressed to an unstressed position. In English, unstressed vowels may reduce to schwa-like vowels, though the details vary with dialect (see stress and vowel reduction in English). The effect may be dependent on lexical stress (for example, the unstressed first syllable of the word photographer contains a schwa /fəˈtɒɡrəfər/, whereas the stressed first syllable of photograph does not /ˈfoʊtəˌgræf -grɑːf/), or on prosodic stress (for example, the word of is pronounced with a schwa when it is unstressed within a sentence, but not when it is stressed).
Many other languages, such as Finnish and the mainstream dialects of Spanish, do not have unstressed vowel reduction; in these languages vowels in unstressed syllables have nearly the same quality as those in stressed syllables.
Stress and rhythm
Some languages, such as English, are said to be stress-timed languages; that is, stressed syllables appear at a roughly constant rate and non-stressed syllables are shortened to accommodate that, which contrasts with languages that have syllable timing (e.g. Spanish) or mora timing (e.g. Japanese), whose syllables or moras are spoken at a roughly constant rate regardless of stress. For details, see isochrony.
Historical effects
It is common for stressed and unstressed syllables to behave differently as a language evolves. For example, in the Romance languages, the original Latin short vowels /e/ and /o/ have often become diphthongs when stressed. Since stress takes part in verb conjugation, that has produced verbs with vowel alternation in the Romance languages. For example, the Spanish verb volver (to return, come back) has the form volví in the past tense but vuelvo in the present tense (see Spanish irregular verbs). Italian shows the same phenomenon but with /o/ alternating with /uo/ instead. That behavior is not confined to verbs; note for example Spanish viento "wind" from Latin ventum, or Italian fuoco "fire" from Latin focum.
Stress "deafness An operational definition of word stress may be provided by the stress "deafness" paradigm.[15][16] The idea is that if listeners perform poorly on reproducing the presentation order of series of stimuli that minimally differ in the position of phonetic prominence (e.g. [númi]/[numí]), the language does not have word stress. The task involves a reproduction of the order of stimuli as a sequence of key strokes, whereby key "1" is associated with one stress location (e.g. and key "2" with the other (e.g). A trial may be from 2 to 6 stimuli in length. Thus, the order is to be reproduced as "1121". It was found that listeners whose native language was French performed significantly worse than Spanish listeners in reproducing the stress patterns by key strokes. The explanation is that Spanish has lexically contrastive stress, as evidenced by the minimal pairs like tópo ("mole") and topó ("[he/she/it] met"), while in French, stress does not convey lexical information and there is no equivalent of stress minimal pairs as in Spanish.
In the context of rhythm studies, the notion of a stress-timed language is often cited, i.e. one where the stresses fall at roughly regular intervals within an utterance. In analyzing such a language in this way, the notion of silent stress is sometimes invoked. The reason is to handle cases where the omission of a stressed syllable in colloquial speech can none the less be `felt'; a regularly cited case in the abbreviated version of thank you, which is said to be the unstressed residue of an unspoken stressed + unstressed combination. A sequence of syllables constituting a rhythmical unit, containing one primary stress, is known as a stress group. In metrical phonology a stress-foot is a string containing as its first element a stressed syllable, followed by zero or more unstressed syllables symbolized by У. The most prominent element in the stress foot is called the head. It should be noted that `foot', in this context, refers to an underlying unit, whose phonetic interpretation varies according to the theoretical approach.
Destressing, in this approach, is a rule, which eliminates stresses produced by foot construction. When two stressed syllables are immediately adjacent, the situation is described as stress clash. Speakers have a tendency to avoid stress clash; for example, the word thirteen is normally stressed on the second syllable, but in the phrase thirteen men, the stress shifts to the first syllable The total system of accents in a language is sometimes called the accentual system, and would be part of the study of phonology. The coinage accentology for the study of accents is sometimes found in European linguistics. (3) In graphology, an accent is a mark placed above a letter, showing how that letter is to be pronounced. French accents, for example, include a distinction between e, e and e. Accents are a type of diacritic"
Most linguists believe that syllabic and lexical accents do not change the meaning of words in English. However, we know that syllabic and lexical accents are also components of linguistic stress along with other concepts such as syllabic and lexical sonority variations and metrical variations. English word stress is traditionally defined as dynamic, but in fact, the special prominence of the stressed syllables is manifested in the English language not only through the increase of intensity, but also through the changes in the vowel quantity, consonant and vowel quality and pitch of the voice. The analytical question here, which attracted a great deal of attention in the middle decades of the twentieth century, is how many degrees of stress need to be recognized in order to account for all such contrasts, and to show the interrelationships between words derived from a common root, such as `telegraph, tele`graphic and te`legraphy.