Jonathan Marks offers a pronunciation activity, with a helpful key for teachers, that focuses on pronouncing stress in compound nouns.
A lot of names of jobs consist of compound nouns with the stress on the first element. For example, someone who drives a bus is a bus-driver, and someone whose job is to put out fires is a fire-fighter.
Work in pairs. Take turns to ask answer the questions, making compounds from lists 1 and 2. Remember to put the stress on the first element. (NB: one of the words in list 2 is used twice.)
What do you call ...
- someone who drives a taxi?
- someone in charge of a shop?
- someone who looks after your children when you go out?
- the player who guards the goal in a football match?
- a teacher who teaches English?
- someone who plays records on the radio or at a disco?
- someone in charge of a bank?
- someone who buys and sells houses?
- someone who directs films?
- someone who plays jazz?
- someone who appears on TV to tell you what the weather's going to be like?
- someone who looks after a building, such as a school?
- someone who sings folk songs?
- someone who reads the news on the TV or radio?
- someone who dances ballet?
|List 1||List 2|
1. a taxi driver
2. a shopkeeper
3. a baby-sitter
4. a goalkeeper
5. an English teacher
6. a disc-jockey
7. a bank manager
8. an estate agent
9. a film director
10. a jazz musician
11. a weather forecaster
12. a caretaker
13. a folk-singer
14. a newsreader
15. a ballet dancer
NB There's a lot of inconsistency about whether these compounds are written as one word, as two words or with a hyphen. For example, some people would write 'taxi-driver' or 'folksinger'.
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