Week 6

It looks like every week my recording becomes longer and slower, when it should have already started becoming shorter and my speech faster...
Here it is.
I remembered the process of working with the audio recording that we had in the OPIE Pronunciation Lab. I also decided to follow this system myself to "wear learner's shoes" for the time I'm practicing this speech.
This week I concentrated on the thought groups, which are essentially the phrases separated from the other ones by pauses. The tricky part about identifying thought groups is that the pauses can be long and obvious (in narrator's speech) or very short and almost unnoticeable (Martina Bollinger's speech). I feel that the thought groups in this speech are very uneven: some of them are unnaturally long, and some – very short. I hope that when I proceed to the next stage (identifying the major stress in each thought group) thought group will become clearer. At least, that's what I observed while working with the tutees. It is often one of the most challenging parts of working with a speech, but it gets better once we move on to something that's more emphasized by the speaker - major stress in a thought group.
The tricky part about these thought groups is that every speaker can potentially read the same speech with pauses in different places. My understanding of the speech does not always coincide with what the narrator or the speaker (Martina Bollinger) is trying to convey. It could be one of the reasons it took me longer than I expected to work on this part.
The next week, as I have already mentioned, I will be identifying and practicing the major stress in every thought group. It should help me sound more natural and closer to the original.