The Music of English

Last June I attended a two day workshop on the subject of teaching pronunciation. It was a marvelous workshop , and during one of the discussion periods, one of the participants jokingly labeled me as a "schwa nazi". because I was so adamant that ESL teachers stress the teaching of the schwa above all other English sounds. (Maybe she wasn't joking!) My thinking was that since the "schwa sound' is the most common sound in the English language, it is only sensible to spend more time teaching it. Schwa nazi? I plead guilty.
We do more than teach that of course. We then go on to teach rules of syllabication, prefixes and suffixes, the sounds of long vowels and short vowels, and a myriad of other skills that I will leave for other discussions.
This is all very important to learning a most complicated language----BUT WHERE'S THE MUSIC? Music is rhythm, and that has to be HEARD with the EARS. I am going to try to show you in PRINT what I mean by the music of English. That is not easy. Do you know what an acronym is? An acronym is using letters to represent words. Here are some acronyms:
FBI, USA, Phd, MIT, TV, CIA, USMC, COD, SOS, IQ, IBM. Now, if you say these acronyms correctly, you will notice the "music" or rhythm of the language. In EVERY case, the stress is on the LAST letter. Say each one like this:
l. FBI= eff--bee--EYE
2. USA=you-ess--EI
3. Phd=pee-aitch--DEE
4. MIT=em-eye-TEE
5. TV=tee--VEE
6. USMC=you--ess--em--SEE

I have checked out as many acronyms as I could find, and in every one the rhythm was the same. The stress is ALWAYS on the last letter. Use your hands and clap them out, or use an elastic and stretch it when you hear the stress pitch.
To people who have spoken this language all of their lives this rhythm comes naturally, but to some new to the language IT NEEDS TO BE TAUGHT!
What approach should the ESL teacher take? My advice is to get the student to feel that rhythm any way you can. Clap your hands, stomp your feet, use elastic bands, use choral reading. Involve as many of the five senses as possible. The more I learn about this business, the more I think that that professor Rassias up there in Dartmouth College may not be as kooky as some people think he is when it comes to teaching English as a Second Language. (We will talk about his methods of teaching English as a Second Language in another post also.)