A Potential Solution to Chinese Students’ Unintelligible English Accent: A Study of the Effectiveness of a Stress Placement Intervention to Improve Chinese English Speakers’ Lexical Pronunciation

Abstract

Due to a lack of authentic learning resources, Chinese students often do not receive native pronunciation models in their classes. This study provided Chinese students with an approach to improve their English pronunciation, specifically to sound more like British Received Pronunciation (RP) or General American English Pronunciation (GAEP). The study proposes word stress prediction rules to help non-native Chinese learners predict the primary word stress of English words, improving their vocabulary pronunciation. Repeated-measures tests confirmed the effectiveness of this model, and statistical results showed that these rules were both applicable and teachable. These rules successfully enabled Chinese English learners to stress the correct vowel in a new English word without consulting a dictionary. Chinese students can rely on these rules for predicting the word stress of dictionary words, enabling them to pronounce new words as accurately as possible to native speakers.