Stress-Shift Dialogue

Students perform short dialogues designed so that contrastive stress shifts naturally from one utterance to the next — training awareness of how English stress carries meaning across turns.

Procedure

1. Prepare or select a 6–8 line dialogue in which each response involves contrastive stress: e.g. "Did you buy it?" / "No, I borrowed it." / "Oh — you borrowed it from Sarah?" / "From my brother, actually."
2. Students read through silently and mark which word they think carries the main stress in each line.
3. In pairs, they perform the dialogue with exaggerated stress placement — deliberately over-stressing to make the contrast audible.
4. Perform again, this time aiming for natural delivery rather than exaggeration.
5. Class debrief: what information did the stress carry? How did it signal contrast, correction, or new information?

Tips

• Design dialogues around genuine communicative functions: correcting, contradicting, confirming, clarifying. Stress patterns divorced from function are quickly forgotten.
• Pairs who sound identical on both roles usually have not understood the contrastive function. Prompt them: "What is A correcting B about?" rather than explaining the stress rule abstractly.
• A short self-recording of Step 4 dramatically increases uptake — students hear what they actually produce versus what they intend, and the gap is usually surprising.
• Exaggeration in Step 3 is pedagogically important: it lets students feel the physical sensation of strong stress before asking them to modulate it into natural speech.