Take a look at the following list of stressed and non-stressed word types.
Basically, stress words are considered CONTENT WORDS such as
- Nouns e.g. kitchen, Peter
- (most) principle verbs e.g. visit, construct
- Adjectives e.g. beautiful, interesting
- Adverbs e.g. often, carefully
Non-stressed words are considered FUNCTION WORDS such as
- Determiners e.g. the, a, some, a few
- Auxiliary verbs e.g. don't, am, can, were
- Prepositions e.g. before, next to, opposite
- Conjunctions e.g. but, while, as
- Pronouns e.g. they, she, us
Write down 'C' for content and 'F' for function. When you have finished click on the arrow to see if you have answered correctly.
Example: magazine (C) as (F) many (F)
went
with
just
quickly
the
hard
next to
CD ROM
open
had
for
information
in order to
difficult
much
exacting
in front of
Jack
he
however
Mark the stressed words in the following sentences. After you have found the stressed words, practice reading the sentences aloud.
- John is coming over tonight. We are going to work on our homework together.
- Ecstasy is an extremely dangerous drug.
- We should have visited some more castles while we were traveling through the back roads of France.
- Jack bought a new car last Friday.
- They are looking forward to your visiting them next January.
- Exciting discoveries lie in Tom's future.
- Would you like to come over and play a game of chess?
- They have been having to work hard these last few months on their challenging experiment.
- Shakespeare wrote passionate, moving poetry.
- As you might have expected, he has just thought of a new approach to the problem.