Lexical Stress and EFL Learners

It is essential for Arab learners of English to learn how to appropriately stress English words. This will minimize the phonological errors in production and may maximize the confidence of Arab learners in producing duration, amplitude, and fundamental frequency in a native-like manner. By doing so, learners may be able to generate regularly recognizable distinctions between stressed and unstressed syllables. A significant segment of this learning will involve the appropriate use of F0 cues and the use of vowel reduction in unstressed syllables. The study shows that Arab learners of English encounter some difficulties in placing English lexical stress correctly and in using some of the acoustic correlates accurately. Such difficulties may be attributable to the level of the learners and to language transfer.

Autorentext

Wael Zuraiq finished his Ph.D. in Linguistics from The University of Kansas, USA in 2005. He is an Assistant professor at Department of English language and literature - The Hashemite University, Jordan. And now he is teaching several courses in English Linguistics, English and Arabic as Foreign Languages.