Arab Efl Learners’ Stress of Compound Words

Abstract

Compound words are ubiquitous in English. Stressing compounds is difficult for EFL learners and native speakers, especially when the meaning is not a sum of the constituent parts. This study explores Arab EFL learners’ stress strategies and outlines their difficulties. It examines whether any of these factors (a) word class, (b) orthography, (c) understanding of phonetics and phonology, (d) age and (e) grade point average (GPA) influence their behaviour and levels of success. It involves 130 second and third-year Jordanian English majors in reading 50 opaque non-frequent compound words, 25 with right-stress and 25 with left-stress. The majority opted for right-stress, producing about half of the stimuli correctly. They right-stressed more often in compound verbs, nouns and adjectives of all spelling forms. Their performance was slightly influenced by the study of phoneticsandphonology, training in stress and GPA. However, there was no noticeable relationship between their stress performance and age. Notably, the subjects needed more training in compound word stress production.

Arab learners’ stress perception and production of English multisyllable items

“…Vowels in Arabic articles, conjunctions, prepositions, etc. are not usually shortened, so weak forms are non-existent (see Alzi'abi, 2011Alzi'abi, , 2017. Remarkably, Almbark et al (2014) and Alzi'abi (2017) have found that Arab EFL learners rarely make any vowel reduction in English.…”

“…There has been a gradual increase in focus on suprasegmental features within Arab textbooks; introducing a growing wealth of phonetic and phonological information (see Alzi'abi, 2017). But still, important phonetic and phonological ideas are ignored by academia because some teachers are unqualified and ill-equipped to teach these topics or have time constraints within their teaching schedules (Alzi'abi, 2017).…”