Abstract:

Pronunciation is the first and most important aspect of communication noticed by native speakers during a conversation. Mispronunciation may cause great misunderstandings and, at times, failure in communication. Prosodic stress and phrasal stress play a crucial role in building accurate, native-like pronunciation. The present study aims to investigate the effect of teaching prosodic stress patterns on the listening skill of EFL learners. For this purpose, a quasi-experimental design was adopted. Forty upper-intermediate adult EFL learners were selected and randomly divided into two groups of twenty learners, named the control group and the experimental group. The listening section of the IELTS test was administered to both groups as the pretest and the posttest of the study. Both groups underwent the mainstream general English instruction provided by the institute for twenty sessions. The experimental group was taught prosodic stress patterns of different words and sentences during the final 30 minutes of each session, for eight of the total twenty sessions. No extra teaching time was devoted to the experimental group. The data was analyzed through an independent-samples t-test. The results show that the experimental group outperformed the control group and there was a considerable difference between the mean scores of students in the two groups. The study concludes that teaching prosodic stress patterns of English to foreign language learners can help their listening comprehension. The obtained results highlight the necessity of teaching prosodic stress patterns to EFL learners and provide tangible evidence for teachers to incorporate such details into their English language instruction. Additionally, this study indicates how intonation and stress are key features to listening comprehension knowledge. Finally, recommendations for further research are provided.

Keywords:

EFL learners, English Language Teaching, listening comprehension, pronunciation, prosodic stress, stress patterns.