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hello this week
I'm going to read you a short passage
that I use in the early lessons with my students
the passage is commonly known as please call stella
and it comes from the speech accent archives which
is an amazing accent research project that's happening in America
on the website you will find nearly 2,000 examples of this
recording and in fact if you look on youtube you will see please call stella has
been recorded many times
my accent the history of my accent
is at eleven years in Dorset
in southwest England and then
five years in
Suffolk in East Anglia then
Essex also in East Anglia and now kent
so my accent has had various
influences see if you can hear in my voice
the different sounds I'm going to attempt to read it with no accent
whatsoever
but naturally sometimes these things are unavoidable
"Please call Stella.
Ask her to bring these things with her from the store
6 spoons of fresh snow peas
5 thick slabs of blue cheese and maybe a snack for her brother Bob
we also need a small plastic snake and a big
toy frog for the kids she can scoop
these things into three red bags and we will go meet her Wednesday
at the train station so as you can hear that passage uses
lots and lots of short vowel sounds and long vowel sounds
and dipthongal sounds there are so many constant clusters
in there the other thing that this piece is useful for is
intonation practice because it's a list we are asking somebody else
to do a task and within that task
is a short list and when we look at tones in a series of items like this
we quite often have repetitive intonation pattern
you could read the repetitive pattern
as steady intonation followed by a fall
you could allow a fall for each item or
you could have a steady intonation pattern right to
the end okay so you could say
6 spoons of fresh snow peas 5 thick slabs of blue cheese
and maybe a snack for her brother Bob that is down
down down or we could say 6 spoons
of fresh snow peas 5 thick slabs of blue cheese
and maybe a snack for her brother Bob
that's flat, all the way along, sounds quite mechanical. What we don't want is going
up on each item because that will make it sound like a
question and we are giving an order so we don't want
6 spoons of fresh snow peas? 5 thick slabs of
blue cheese? and maybe a snack for her brother Bob?
so we don't want that upward inflection for this example
Have a go! you can easily find the text
and I'm going to caption this video as well watch it again
and practice and enjoy the practice
Good Luck! Goodbye!