Abstract
The main cause of pronunciation problems faced by EFL learners is their lack of a suprasegmental background. Most of those having oral comprehension and expression difficulties are unaware that their difficulty comes from their negligence of concepts of stress, pitch, juncture and linkers. While remedying stress problems, students should be taught the general rules, emphasising on primary and secondary stress, using various forms of pitch to give emotions to their utterances, taking shorter and longer pauses between meaningful thought chunks through junctures, and solidifying such suprasegmentals through constant exercises in dialogues as seen in model videos. Native speakers react more violently to unacceptable suprasegmental errors than segmental ones; thus, neglect of such important pronunciation elements risk harming the quality of communication. Learners of English should consider the good old cliche, It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it, if they want to have effective communication with their audience. Keywords: Stress placement, primary, secondary stress, prominence, compound/phrasal stress, pitch, juncture, fossilised error, algorith of suffixes
Highlights
General Outline of Suprasegmental FeaturesSuprasegmental features include stress, juncture, pitch, rhythm and linkers. Stress is the prominent element in a word
Most errors committed in the rhythm is stressing every word in the sentence, not reducing the unstressed syllables and function words, not using contractions (I’ll, he’ll, what’s, what’ve, etc.) or unstressing one-syllable content words and pronouncing them too quickly
Mispronounced sounds and incorrect stress are often neglected and left unattended. İgnoring such items as stress, pausing and intonation and linking are used in connected speech for sucessful communication
Summary
Suprasegmental features include stress, juncture, pitch, rhythm and linkers. Stress is the prominent element in a word. In connected speech, linking, stress, pausing and intonation along with weak and strong f orms of grammar words [for example saying ‘does’ (dʌz) rather than (dǝz) or contractions ‘I’ll’, ‘he’s’ etc.] are less likely to cause a communication breakdown. Teachers should concentrate on pitches during their listening activities (e.g., listening for rising intonation in yes/no questions), have their learners compare question intonation in English with that of their native languages; and have them imitate dialogues and perform plays while watching videos in which yes/no questions are used They should read perception exercises on duration of stress, loudness of stress and pitch, do exercises on recognising and producing weak, unstressed syllables, present pronunciation rules for stress and teach them juncture, meaning how to break words in a sentence to make meaningful thought chunks
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