Speaking and Translation

In many engineering jobs, speaking English may be equally important to writing and reading. The aim of this chapter is not to make you sound like a native speaker but to improve your confidence in speaking.

Speaking English is perhaps not very difficult for someone who has listened to English in films and songs from a very young age. However, most Norwegians will have little experience in speaking English in a professional and academic context. Consequently, this book does not concern itself with the language skills needed when ordering a pizza, but rather when explaining a technical problem.

Let us first agree on the following: You will probably never be able to speak like a native speaker. Accepting that is important to avoid frustration. Set realistic goals for yourself. If you compare yourself with a native speaker, you may end up disappointed and discouraged. As a foreign speaker, you will invariably have a foreign accent and may stumble over your words. This is completely normal. Progress in speaking a foreign language requires some audacity and even indifference to your shortcomings. Remember, perfection is sometimes the enemy of progress. There are, however, important improvements that are entirely achievable. This chapter will help you un- derstand a few fundamentals of pronunciation, stress, and intonation that will make you a more confident English speaker. In fact, compared to English grammar, English pronunciation is fairly predictable and rule-based.

There is another important benefit to this: the more fluent you are in speaking, the more fluent you will be in writing and communication. These are not disconnected skills. It will make it easier to both learn and engage in conversations, both in professional and in social contexts.

You may benefit from watching the many video resources that exist on the Internet. Some good ones are available here: www.universitetsforlaget.no/englishforengineers

Clear pronunciation is essential when speaking English. First of all, clarity of communication helps ensure that you are understood correctly. Skill in pronunciation also helps you understand others better, particularly when listening to native speakers. Besides, good pronunciation is a sign of professionalism that in a workplace setting will make a positive impression on others. Wrong pronunciation may not only distract the listener but cause the listener to question the speaker’s abilities and expertise.

We will concentrate first on the pronunciation of individual words. Read the text below (Exercise 1.1) and pay particular attention to the correct pronunciation of individual words.

One useful tip is to read English aloud or in a whisper. When studying pronunciation, it is useful to slightly exaggerate sound and stress.

Use an online dictionary such as https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ to test your pronunciation. Look up most of the words in this text box as you read. Your pronunciation is probably more or less correct. Nevertheless, compare with the audio pronunciation of the dictionary, listen, and imitate (use earphones if you have them). Note that US and British pronunciation may differ.

If you look up the word characterize, you will find the word phonetically transcribed like this: /’kærəktəraɪz/. You have probably not learnt the symbols of phonetic transcription, but much of it is intuitive and easily learnt. You will find a helpful guide to phonetic transcription in Figure 1.1.

One useful feature of phonetic transcription is the little apostrophe. In characterize, it indicates that stress is on the first syllable. A syllable is a unit of sound within a word and consists of one or more vowel sound. There are two syllables in payment, with stress on the first, and four in contribution, with stress on the third. Configuration, chronological and authenticity have five syllables each, and accessibility and idiosyncrasy have six. Many words have only one syllable each, such as claw, paw, and fur.

Correctly stressed words are key to excellent English pronunciation. Stress means the emphasis given to a particular word or a part of a word. Spoken English should not sound flat and monotone. In fact, if you pronounce every word in a sentence with equal pitch and volume, others will find it difficult to understand you. Importantly, stress helps create a rhythm when speaking as well as conveying meaning.

This is about the distribution of stress within a word. One word cannot have two equally strong stresses. If you hear two equal stresses, you have heard two words. The stress in /’pistol/ is on the first syllable, as indicated by the apostrophe. The apostrophe is positioned in front of the stressed syllable.

The word pistol has two syllables, but the second is not stressed. However, in some words with more than three syllables, one can have a secondary stress. This is the second most prominent syllable in the word. It is pronounced with a lower pitch and less loudly.

Pronounce the word fortification. This word has five syllables. The stress is distributed like this /,fortifi’cation/, with the primary stress on the fifth syllable and secondary stress on the first. In full phonetic transcription: /ˌfɔːtɪfɪ’keɪʃn/.

In some words, the primary stress may shift from one syllable to another and thus alter the meaning of the word. The change of word stress is what distinguishes between a verb and a noun such as in present: /’present/ or /pre’sent/. The same goes for words such as export, import, contract and object. However, not all similar words follow that pattern, such as report and design.

Pay attention to the schwa /ə/, the most common vowel sound in English. Another important feature is the division between the ‘voiced’ and ‘unvoiced’ consonants, such as the two different ways of pronouncing th, the ‘voiced’ /ð/ and ‘unvoiced’ /θ/. ‘Voiced’ means the vocal cords vibrate.

And remember, words in connected speech are commonly pronounced differently from words spoken in isolation.

In longer words with several syllables, there is a similar change of meaning as a consequence of where stress is put, as in /’photograph/, /pho’tographer/ and /photo’graphic/.

Look up the following words and indicate the primary stress with an apostrophe.

Perpendicular, alteration, volunteer, buttress, abbreviation, equality, armchair, computation, suitcase, dishwasher, proficient, carelessness, poisonous, refugee, comfortable, advantageous, first-rate, controversy, superstructure. Use www.dictionary.cambridge.org

Use www.dictionary.cambridge.org

Identify word stress in the following word family:

Neutral, neutrality, neutralize, neutralization

The same pattern applies to similar word families, such as central, brutal, etc.

Another pattern of word stress is related to the suffix, meaning the end of a word. For example: in education the suffix is -ion. Consider -ion words such as information, relation, compartmentalization, and explanation. What is the stress pattern for these words?

The same stress pattern applies for words ending with -ual (bilingual), -ious (furious), -ial (artificial), -ior (inferior), -ic (claustrophobic), and more.

Words with suffixes such as -ment and -ism follow a different stress pattern, as in parliament and parliamentary, government and governmental, and department and departmental.

For the majority of two-syllable verbs with a prefix, the stress almost invariably comes second, such as in become, propose, and improve. A prefix is a group of letters such as be-, un-, and mis-. For two syllable nouns and adjectives, however, there is no general rule. Some, like expert and finite, begin with a stressed syllable, whereas in words like report and concise, stress comes second.

First of all, you need to understand which words we generally stress and which we do not. Basically, we give stress to certain words because they carry more meaning and are more central to the statement than the other words. These are so-called content words. Non-stressed words are considered function words. Consider the following phrase:

• Your keys are on the floor.

The important two words are keys and floor. If you were extremely exhausted and only able to mutter two words, these are the two words you would probably select.

Since content words are given stress, they take more time and effort to pronounce. Compare the following two sentences:

• The apartment near the old town of Ulm was his precious hideaway for the remaining years of his life.

• The apocalyptic danger is both intimidating and malignant to the core.

Even though the first sentence is about 50% longer than the second, both sentences take about 4 to 5 seconds to speak. This is because they both contain the same number of stressed words (in blue).

With this in mind, a good piece of advice when speaking is to concentrate on the correct pronunciation of the stressed content words. These words are to be pronounced clearly and fully, whereas function words can be passed by quickly.

In this regard, English and Norwegian are similar. Both are typically so-called stressed-timed languages. Unstressed syllables are shortened while stressed words are pronounced fully. Combined, the stressed and unstressed syllables together create a particular rhythm when spoken.

Sentence stress refers to the most prominent syllable in a spoken phrase. Let us consider some typical ways in which sentence stress is used.

The final syllable in a statement is often stressed more than the preceding one (sentence stress is shown in red):

• He’s singing.

• He’s singing in the bathroom.

• He’s singing in the bathroom with his girlfriend.

Generally, in most phrases, the final syllable is stressed the most.

Another type of sentence stress is emphatic stress. This calls attention to what you want to emphasize. Note how it may change the meaning of the statement in the following example:

• Peter came to the party yesterday. (It was him, not someone else)

• Peter came to the party yesterday. (He actually showed up)

• Peter came to the party yesterday. (Not a meeting or something else)

• Peter came to the party yesterday. (Not two weeks ago)

Use stress to change the meaning of the following sentences:

• Jack will drive to the concert tonight.

• I love to sing.

• I love to drive around town with you.

• You are responsible for the first phase.

• I think you are having an affair with Roger.

Another type is extreme stress. These are adverbs such as: extremely, terribly and completely which are often given stress in a sentence in order to provide added emphasis.

• I completely agree with you in this matter.

• Going out that night was a terrible mistake.

Contrastive stress:

• I think he likes this book the most.

• I cannot decide between this or that pair of trousers.

Can/can’t is often given stress, in particular in the negative phrase. Consider how the verb is given different emphasis in the following examples.

• They can come on Friday.

• They can’t come on Friday.

In the first example, “can” is part of a positive and confirmative phrase. In this case it can be quickly glided over. In fact, it is hardly pronounced at all. On the other hand, when we use the negative form “can’t” or “cannot”, it is given stress.

Listen and identify stressed words in spoken English.

Look up a news broadcast from either www.gbnews.uk/watchlive, https://www.bbc.com/news/ world, or https://news.sky.com/

Listen and identify which words are stressed and which are not. Pause the video after each spoken phrase and identify the stressed content words. Notice and discuss their importance not only in terms of how they contribute to what is conveyed, but also in terms of creating a rhythm of speech. Put on your earphones and try emulating the speech.

Finally, a few words on linking sounds and assimilation. In many cases, a native speaker will make adjacent sounds more like each other. If words are joined effectively, one sounds more fluent and is able to speak more quickly, too.

In some instances, one word may be divided into two different sound chunks. Very often it is the sound at the end of a word and the initial sound of the next word that are affected. For example, the statement: Such a nice afternoon, is pronounced like this: “Su cha ni cafternoon”.

Or consider the phrase “Nice to meet you”. Pronounced together it sounds very different from when pronounced word by word. For instance, when a word ends with a t, and the next word starts with a y, the two sounds merge and becomes a “tsj”; /nais to mi: tsju/. This is an example of assimilation. Another example of the same is “Can I get you a beer?”. There are many sound changes of this kind in spoken English, in particular in colloquial English.

Often it is the less important function words that are transformed, such as in the keys are on the floor. Say the phrase aloud and listen to how the three function words are on the sounds. Is it more like a:-n-d?

To master assimilation is not essential to be understood, but it does make the speaker sound much more fluent, and without it, speaking may sound artificial and staccato.

In everyday spoken English, when words are strung together, many words are seriously transformed. Some words, for instance, often have a weak form, such as conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, auxiliaries, and articles. Such words may more or less disappear in connected speech, or they blend into a neighbouring sound.

Try reading the dialogue below while paying attention to content words, weak forms and their assimilation, as well as stress and intonation.

Figure 1.2: My friend Pepper, the social robot at the SimVis lab at IIR/IE/NTNU, provides a weather update (Photo: AU).

My Friend Pepper

– Hello, my name is Pepper. What’s your name?

I’m Anders. Nice to meet you. I’m in the office next door.

– Hi, Anders. I’m glad you stopped by. Would you like to sit down for a minute?

– Thanks. You have time for a chat? I mean, you must be busy cultivating your social life. After all, you’re a social robot, right?

– Yes, sure, you should’ve been here last week. There was a conference or something. It was crazy.

– So, Pepper, what do you think about the weather?

– The weather is nice and calm. Temperature is 6 degrees Celsius, but there’ll be a chilly breeze this afternoon.

– Oh dear! Really? Don’t you just hate that constant wind chill. Anyway, nice talking to you. It’s late; I must go. See you!

– Have a nice day, Anders!

An exercise in /ɪɡˌzædʒəˈreɪʃn/.

Listen and pause after some of the phrases and try repeating. Pay attention to how it seems as though the speakers exaggerate pronunciation and stress. By exaggerating, you will be able to discover and learn a broader range of phonetic sounds in the English language.

Look up the following journalists on YouTube:

• Zainab Badawi (BBC) and her documentaries on African history

• Nana Akua (GB News) and one of her news analyses

And on Ted – www.ted.com – look up these speakers:

• Niall Ferguson (Scotland)

• Jay Walker (USA)

• Julia Dhar (New Zealand)