Word-level stress patterns in the academic word list

Abstract

This paper addresses teachers and researchers of English as a second or foreign language who are interested in speech intelligibility training and/or vocabulary acquisition. The study reports a stress-pattern analysis of the Academic Word List (AWL) as made available by Coxhead [TESOL Quarterly 34 (2000) 213]. To examine the AWL in a new way, we identified patterns of word-level stress in the AWL's 525 headwords and 2454 sublist items, or 2979 polysyllabic academic words in all. The report's final table rank orders 39 patterns of word-level stress. We learned that the first 14 patterns encompass over 90% of the AWL's lexical items, while the remaining 25 patterns are low in frequency of occurrence. Results of our analysis may be coupled with information on word-level stress already available in the literature (e.g., systematic shifts in word-level stress—as well as corresponding changes in vowel quality—due to such phenomena as suffixation, derivational morphology, and other aspects of rule-based pedagogy). The paper's concluding section highlights the importance of introducing English for Academic Purposes (EAP) learners to such pattern phenomena in coordination with the word stress frequency data reported in the study.