Actually

Mark said

If the idea is that students should learn to ignore bits that don’t matter, is there a case for focusing on them first? For example, “actually” used as a filler, and radically reduced, may become a “noise” like ahiy. We could focus on lots of examples of this word in context, with the hope that in the future, when students hear a noise like that in the flow of speech, they go, “Oh, it’s just one of those meaningless fillers again – I won’t waste time on working out which one it is, and instead keep my attention space open for words which DO matter”.

In other words, could we say (occasionally, at least)  “Listen to every word now so that you don’t have to listen to every word later”?

Absolutely! We need to teach learners about the sound substance of speech – including the different soundshapes that words such as actually (and indeed all words) can have – so that they can use this knowledge in their higher order processing of meaning. They need to become familiar and comfortable with the realities of the stream of speech, rather than rest (as many of them do for too long) unfamiliar and uncomfortable with these realities.

The citation form for ‘actually’ has either three or four syllables, with primary stress on the first syllable:

|ˈæk.ʧu.əl.i| or |ˈæk.ʧul.i|.

Pronunciation dictionaries tell us that two syllable forms are also possible

|ˈæk.ʃli| and |ˈæk.ʃi|

But there’s another variation on the soundshape in unit 03 below:

01 || well i reMEMber ||
02 || something FUNNy happened ||
03 || actualLY ||

In 03 ‘actually’ occurs in a speech unit of its own: it has three syllables, and a tonic prominence with rising tone on the final syllable, even though this is unstressed in the citation form. This is not unusual for ‘actually’ at the end of a clause, before a pause.