The Effect of English Songs on Chinese Students’ Acquisition of Word Stress in a Rural Junior High School

Abstract

Few studies have examined how teaching English songs to junior high school students in rural areas affects students’ English pronunciation. To fill this gap, we taught English songs to 39 rural junior high school students and tested their perception and production of English words with different stress patterns before and after the session of learning English songs. Students were asked to identify the position of word stress for a list of disyllabic words, and they were asked to read the disyllabic words with different stress placements. Teachers evaluated the students’ pre-test and post-test performance, and acoustic measures were taken to compare their pronunciation in two sessions. After two weeks, the production test revealed an improvement in the students’ ability to produce English stress. In the post-test, students could more effectively use the duration cue to distinguish between stressed and unstressed syllables. However, students’ perception improvement was not attested. The findings generally indicated that English songs have a beneficial impact on junior high school students in rural areas who are learning English word stress.