For our web application build we’ve got a distributed team: Miami, Washington, Canada, and Venezuela. So I’m always on the lookout to acquire better virtual collaboration skills, and The Bumble Bee is a new resource I found after they wrote a manifesto in Seth Godin’s Change This (actually, I think Change This passed into new hands recently). I love Robin Good and Change This always has great content for BE teaching.

Anyway, the BB enters my aggregator every morning now, and today there’s a post that will make a great class or class activity on intonation and meaning. Off the cuff, I see one possible staging like this (read the post first for this to make sense):

1) a warmer discussion on company culture, or projects and team autonomy, etc.

2) whiteboard the sentence and talk about what it means for a bit without getting into the word stress issue

3) have individual Ss say it: T, group, or partner notes which word is stressed. You will probably need to contextualize the sentence with some scenario, so that it’s not artificial

4) do the “stressed word” vs “what that means” as a jumbled text activity - lots of good vocab should come out

5) go back to the notes on what word each Ss stressed - discuss

6) discuss if this whole thing is valid…what do the Ss think? In real life would a NS actually stress “do”? (seems to me infrequently). If the word “can’t” is stressed, does that reflect concern over “beliefs and values”… or “ability”? (seems to me the latter).

+ Option (regarding validity): if you work in a school, go around and record fellow teachers saying the sentence. Which word do they stress? Discuss.

Lots of different options here and I think lots of cool language could come out of this. Very Ss-centered as well - much discussion is about their personal beliefs, business or otherwise. You could do it with a fluency, vocab, or intonation work focus - I’d probably blend all three by digging up a few more intonation / word stress examples. And I think you could tweak this to make it successful at any level except beginner - higher elementary and up.

What do you think?