Erroneous Word-Stress Patterns Used by EFL Yemeni Learners

Asmaa Adel Abdulrahman,Ramamoorthy L

doi:10.54392/ijll2145

Abstract

This experimental study aims at investigating the English word-stress patterns used by Yemenis, learning English as a foreign language, and the erroneous stress patterns used by them. Accent or stress is a feature of high significance in English speech. At the level of a word, one syllable gets accentuated with primary stress. To achieve the purpose of this study, and to find out to what extent word stress of Received Pronunciation English poses difficulty on Yemeni Arabic speakers using English as a foreign language, 120 subjects of various scientific disciplines, were chosen for data collection. They were recorded and their utterances went through deep analysis based on the auditory impression of the researcher and on the spectrographic evidence resulting from the speech analysis of the software program PRAAT. The most significant findings reached by the researcher were that word-stress in the four-syllable target words were the most problematic for the speakers in which 53.2% of them put the stress, randomly, on the wrong syllables in words. Three-syllable target words appeared to be less problematic as 44.4% of the participants placed the stress inaccurately in words. The least difficulties encountered by the speakers were with the two-syllable target words where 70.6% of the speakers managed to pronounce the words with correct stress placement. It is noteworthy to mention that there was a tendency among the speakers who produced wrong stress patterns, to accent either the first syllable or the one including a long vowel or a diphthong in the words.

Highlights

Language is a complex skill and an essential part of human social development
The current experimental study was carried out on 120 EFL Yemeni speakers to figure out the area of errors and difficulties regarding word accent in RP
It can be revealed that the more syllables are there in the word, the more errors are made by the speakers as four-syllable words had the highest percentage of erroneous stress placement with 53.2% disconformity with RP, followed by three-syllable words with 44.4%, and the twosyllable words which contained the least percentage of errors; 29.4%

Summary

Introduction

Language is a complex skill and an essential part of human social development. EFL Yemenis, like many EFL and ESL learners, aspire to achieve a language competency that enables them to master the four skills of English, mainly the speaking one. Reed & Levis (2019) states that ‘even though, a native-like accent is impossible for most adult learners, pronunciation remains the gateway to spoken intelligibility for learners because of its close ties to social meanings within language’. In linguistics of English, stress or accent is a suprasegmental feature which is defined as, relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word, or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. This emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness (its physical counterpart is intensity measured by dB), vowel length (duration), full articulation of the vowel, and changes in pitch (its physical counterpart is frequency measured by Hz) (Fry, 1964). To put it more clearly, the accentual pattern of English words is fixed, in the sense that the primary accent always falls on a particular syllable of any given word, but free, in the sense that the primary accent is not tied to any particular point in the chain of syllables constituting a word (Gimson, 2014)

Methods

Results

Conclusion