Teaching English Stress: A Case Study

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of teaching pronunciation in English as a second language (ESL) classes by specifically looking at the impact of teaching lexical stress rules and tendencies on learners' stress placement performance. Sixteen rules in the form of interactive worksheets were taught in three ESL classes at pre‐intermediate, intermediate, and upper intermediate levels (N = 38). The rules were taught and reviewed during 9 weeks, each taking approximately 25 minutes of class time. They dealt with four areas: word categories, compound nouns, verb‐noun pairs, and suffixes. The participants recorded a list of carefully chosen 100 words two times, once before and once after the teaching of the rules. The results show a statistically significant reduction of mean error percentage from 33.8% to 18.3%, with an effect size (Cohen's d) of 1.67. The implications of this research are twofold. On the one hand, it is evidence for the successful teaching of suprasegmentals and in particular lexical stress rules in ESL classes, and on the other, it contains a methodology and a sample lesson plan for teaching such rules (see Appendix A). The article thus argues for the inclusion of English lexical stress prediction rules in the ESL pronunciation curriculum to enhance learners' overall intelligibility.