Page 74 - @ccess 3 Teacher´s Book

Activity 12 (continues)
• Rhythm is quite a complex
aspect of speech, but rather
useful in understanding why
some words are unstressed.
Rhythm has to do with the
sequence of stressed and
unstressed syllables in normal
speech. When the time between
stressed syllables is the same,
independent of how many
syllables there are between two
words, we call this a stress-time
language. English is a prime
example of this. On the contrary,
Chinese people (as your
students can hear) tend to give
the same time to each syllable
when talking, irrespective
of whether they have an accent
or not. These languages (for
example, Spanish also belongs
to this group) are called
syllable-time languages. When
listening to English, there are
lots of unheard sounds and
syllables because of the rhythm.

Activity 13
• The objective of this activity
is for students to identify different
formal details that are useful to
improve comprehension and
then to make comments.
• There is a change in intonation at the end of structures with verbs, this means intonation can be detected
in the middle of a sentence or at its end. Remind your students that intonation can change meaning,
especially in questions.
Activity 14
• In this case, make sure your students write their sentences in the most detailed way possible as a means
of understanding the text in full, without going into extreme detail. It should, however, be clear that some
pieces of information are more important than others.

• Clarify the importance of recognizing, as a comprehension strategy, the main ideas in a television program
and being able to differentiate them from detail and secondary information.

Teacher’s Book / Practice 4 73