Hi everyone, long time no see. Hope you have all been well. In our last article we looked at 3 syllable words and how you can group words together based on their STRESS PATTERN to help your students remember more words. However as we move into 4 syllable words, things become less predictable. Look and listen to each word below. Can you find any way to group the STRESS PATTERNS together?
You may find that it is more difficult to group words together with the same STRESS PATTERN when moving up to 4 syllable words.
What Can We Do?
If you want to help your students to remember words with 4 syllables, a solution may be to group words together that have a RHYMING sound instead. RHYMING sounds are sounds which sound the same. For example, ‘cat’ and ‘hat’ both have /æ/ shown by the letter ‘a’. When we move up to multi-syllabic words (words with more than one syllable) the RHYMING sound is usually at the end. Can you find which words in the pictures above have the same RHYMING sound at the end?
You can see that each of the words above end with an /əʊ/ sound shown by the letter ‘o’. These RHYMING sounds can be powerful and you may find that your students will remember the words more easily when studying words with the same RHYMING sound together.
You can also group these 4 syllable words with 3 syllable words. Can you remember any 3 syllable words from our last article which end with an /əʊ/ sound?
There are also other RHYMING sounds. For example words ending with an /ə/ sound. This is usually shown with letters ‘er’ and ‘a’ at the end of the word. Can you group any words from this article and the last article which end with an /ə/ sound?
As you can see all these words end with an /ə/ sound. Do you find them easier to remember?
There are many more RHYMING sounds. Can you think of more words from our articles on fruits, vegetables, herbs and nuts that have the same RHYMING sound at the end? If you do, let us know in the COMMENT BOX below.
Conclusion
When teaching your students vocabulary remember that you can group words together in a vareity of ways. In our articles so far we focused on grouping words according to STRESS PATTERNS but as we move up to longer words, STRESS PATTERNS become less predictable. However this does show us that we can also group words according to RHYMING sounds and in this case the RHYMING sounds are usually at the end of the word.
Give it a try with your students and let us know if your students are able to remember more words as a result.
Thank you for reading our article and as usual LIKE, COMMENT and SHARE if you found it useful!
We have plans to produce some vidoes for future blogs, so please keep an eye out for that.
Catch you all soon!
The English Language Education Classroom 
Very useful for us and our students. Many thanks
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