Basic Word Stress

The BBC published a video about the discovery of a new planet. The surprising thing is, not only is it close to Earth, but it could be capable of supporting life. As you can imagine, this is an interesting and surprising news story. The Science Correspondent uses basic word stress to emphasise certain words. These words are the most important to the meaning she wants to give to what she is saying.

Scientists Have Discovered an Earth-Like Planet

Published by BBC News on 24th August 2016

Free Lesson on Basic Word Stress

Transcript in Pdf:

basic-word-stress-transcription

Transcript in Word:

basic-word-stress-transcription

Word Stress Is Really Syllable Stress

The video contains subtitles for you to follow. However, I have included a full transcript of the video with a clear indication of her basic word stress. I won’t go too much into the detail of why she stresses a particular word, or why she did not choose to stress words consistently. Nor will I comment on intonation. I will mention that I have highlighted syllables which she did stress. We stress syllables rather than words. You should notice that I highlighted some full words and this is because they are one syllable words.

How I Mark Basic Word Stress

You may even disagree with how I have marked the stress. Rebecca stresses some words more clearly than others. It is not simply the case that she stressed the highlighted words and did not stress the others. As a native English speaker, she gives different amounts of stress to different words. This may appear difficult for you to grasp at first and I wouldn’t expect a student to immediately start stressing words like a native English speaker after this lesson. I have chosen this exercise to get you thinking about word stress and listening for word stress. You need to build up a awareness of this over time so it is very much a gradual process.

English Pronunciation Lessons

I am an English pronunciation teacher and in my classes I look at word stress in more detail with my students. We try to make some sentences together using stress where we feel it would be most appropriate. We also discuss the subject of videos such as these and I check students’ use of stress within the context of the discussion. This helps them contextualise basic word stress and makes it more natural for them to use apply it.

Vocabulary

I have highlighted and underlined a few items of vocabulary from the video that might be useful. I have also added synonyms to some of them, which I have only highlighted.

According to modern science, the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. But mankind is only roughly 200,000 years old.

We need to visit new planets to find and extract resources. It is very tricky extracting oil from below the sea bed. We do not have the technology to do something so difficult and complicated.

All of the Following Are Phrasal Verbs

In science many things are not what we thought they were. Doctors used to prescribe cigarettes to relieve stress but since then they realised they were dangerous to our health – cigarettes turned out not to be unhealthy.

This new plant has been hiding so close to us that we couldn’t see it. It was right under our noses.

We would find it difficult to live on another planet as it could take thousands of days for that planet to go round its sun. We are used to the Earth orbiting around the sun for 365 days.

I couldn’t sleep last night because my neighbour was blasting out his radio so loudly. This is just another example of how polluting humans are.

We have ruled out the possibility of setting up a city on Mars because its too far for us to get there. This means that there is no chance of us doing it.

There is lots more to discover about the new planet. But there is also plenty to find out about the Earth.

Transcription With Word Stress

I’m Rebecca Morelle, the BBC’s science correspondent
and here’s what you need to know about the new planet Proxima b.
It’s close
In space terms, this planet’s practically our neighbour.
It’s “just” four light years away
It turns out it’s been hiding right under our noses,
Orbiting around our closest star [outside our Solar System], Proxima Centauri.
It’s Earth–sized
Proxima b is roughly the same size as the Earth
And like our planet, scientists think it’s a rocky, solid world.
It’s in the Goldilocks zone
This means the planet’s not too close to its star and too hot,
or too far away and too cold. Instead it’s just right:
just right for liquid water to potentially exist.
And if there’s water, there might be life.

But radiation is an issue
So don’t get too excited.
Proxima b orbits a highly active star that blasts out incredibly intense radiation
That would make it tricky for anything to survive, but some think it might not rule life out.
Getting there is mission impossible
Even though this exoplanet is the closest we’ve ever found,
it would still take thousands of years to get there.
But it’s still a great place to study
and with ground and space–based telescopes scientists will /be able to/ take a closer look to find out if
Proxima b really does have the conditions that are right for life.