Abstract:

The teaching and learning processes have fundamentally been transformed during the past decade, and so has the teaching and learning of foreign languages. In primary and lower secondary education, teachers and educators are expected to teach children and provide them with various facts and knowledge related to various school subjects; however, they are also expected to prepare them for real-life situations to deal with and cope with in a very short time. While doing so, teachers must not forget one of the crucial tasks of didactics, which is to systematically and continuously explore the potential of the new technologies, incorporate them effectively into the teaching process and thus provide their students not only with the necessary knowledge, but also with the inevitable progress in keeping up with the new available technologies.

This study examines the effectiveness of selected online tools in improving English stress placement and raising accent awareness among lower secondary school students. The research was conducted over a four-month period (September–December during the 2025/2026 academic year), during which instruction took place biweekly in four-week cycles with a group of students aged 14–15. The primary objective of the study was to enhance students’ pronunciation skills and develop their awareness of stress placement in English words. The methodology involved a combination of guided classroom activities and the use of digital tools, including the Cambridge Online Dictionary and the ELSA Speak application. The instructional process was designed to be interactive, systematic, and practice-oriented. In the pre-testing phase, students completed a questionnaire in which they indicated stress placement in a set of carefully selected vocabulary items drawn from the Project Explore 4 textbook series, based on their existing stress placement knowledge. Following the instructional intervention, a post-test was administered using comparable tasks.

The results were obtained by comparing pre-test and post-test performance, with particular attention to improvements in stress placement accuracy. The findings indicate a measurable improvement and increased awareness of English word stress. This paper presents a detailed description of the classroom activities, the selected vocabulary set, and a quantitative analysis of student performance, including percentage scores achieved in both the pre-testing and post-testing phases.

Keywords:

Technology, on-line teaching tools, on-line language learning apps, pronunciation, stress-placement, primary education.