For an efficient Professional Improvement

Things are changing at a great speed

technology,society,notions,culture,customs and mores ... These new phenomena are affecting our way of living and we must be ready before being swallowed up.

Since teaching is our concern, we need to follow the trend and change in the professional side.For an efficient Professional Improvement is just a proposal for a smooth and objective discussion about the content of the new books of English in terms of

The content of the book and its structure
The content of a file and how to enrich
The specifities of each file : objectives/ language points /phonology
:The topics that need a special care such as pronunciation/symbols/intonation/stress/parts of speech-
.projects/portfolios etc-

To make the dream of changing come true, numerous efforts need to be
made, and this is what all the teachers have permanently done
So, make the first step and start with the following topic:

strong forms / weak forms

This aspect of the spoken language has always interested me because it was a puzzling/ confusing companion.But thanks to the internet I could find help and managed to teach it and understand it more.

Here are some documents and links to help you


In the phonology of stress-timed languages, the weak form of a
word is a form that may be used when the word has no stress, and which is phonemically distinct from the strong form, used when the word is stressed. The strong form serves as the citation form. A weak form is a word as an unstressed syllable, and is therefore distinct from a clitic form, which is a word fused with an adjacent word, as in Italian mangiarla, 'to-eat-it'. A word may have multiple weak forms, or none. In some contexts, the strong form may be used even where the word is unstressed.

In English, most words will have at least one stressed syllable, and hence no separate strong and weak forms. All words which do have distinct strong and weak forms are monosyllables, and are usually function words or discourse particles. For most of these, the weak form is the one usually encountered in speech. As the extreme example, the strong form of the indefinite article a is used only in the rare cases when the word is stressed: naming the word, or when emphasizing indefiniteness. For instance:

Question: "Did you find the cat?"
Answer: "I found a [eɪ] cat." (i.e. maybe not the one you were referring to).
Otherwise (unless one is risking pomposity) the weak form [ə] is used for a.
The main words with weak forms in Received Pronunciation are:

a, am, an, and, are, as, at, be, been, but, can, could, do, does, for, from, had, has, have, he, her, him, his, just, me, must, of, shall, she, should, some, than, that, the, them, there, to, us, was, we, were, who, would, you
Other dialects or accents may have others. Many varieties have a weak form [jɚ] for your, which can, for example in dialogue, be spelled "yer". In some British regional pronunciations, such as Hiberno-English, there is a weak form [mi] for my, often spelled "me". A greater difference between strong and weak forms, and a more widespread use of weak forms, are associated with less formal registers, and may be indicated in writing by eye dialect spellings, such as ’em for them [əm]. The most formal register in this sense is singing, where strong forms may be used almost exclusively, apart (normally) from a.
In deriving weak forms from strong forms, the vowel is usually more central and may be shortened, sometimes merging to a syllabic consonant with any following [l], [m] or [n]. Changes to consonants are less frequent: an initial h is dropped unless the word is at the start of an utterance, and dental consonants may be elided at the end of the word. For example:

• The word and has strong form [ænd] and weak forms [ənd], [ən], [nd], [n].
  
• The word to has strong form [tuː], weak form [tʊ] before vowels, and weak form [tə] before consonants (or even before a vowel, inserting a glottal stop in between).
  

The 'em form of them is derived from the otherwise obsolete synonym hem: an unusual form of suppletion.
Some weak forms have restricted usage. For example, in RP usage:

• Dropping the [h] of her is common in "I saw her yesterday" but not in "I saw her mother" (possessive her).
  
• Demonstrative that uses the strong form even when unstressed. "I like that colour" (demonstrative, strong), as against "I like that you like it" (conjunction, weak).
  
• Stranded auxiliaries and prepositions use the strong form. "I found what I'm looking for." (stranded for, strong) as against "I'm looking for money" (for before noun, weak).
  

Wikipedia Encyclopedia


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_form_and_strong_form

www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/staff/tench/strongandweakforms.pdf

www.marlodge.supanet.com/museum/weakform.html

exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol41/no2/p32.htm

There are lots of sites go and search
Best of luck

Habba Mohamed
Cheikh Naimi Middle School
Ouled-Djellal.