Arab learners’ stress perception and production of English multisyllable items

Abstract

Mastering word stress is a crucial part of learning the English language because it is a vital part and parcel of word recognition and intelligibility. Arab EFL learners complain about the mystifying and elusive English stress patterns. This research examines their stress production and perception of di-, tri- and polysyllabic English words. Arab learners initially produced 90 infrequent English words with various syllable structures and word classes. They then identified the stressed syllables when hearing the words from native speakers. Analysis of the data showed that Arabs had a serious problem producing English word stress correctly owing to their tendency to mainly stress ultimate heavy syllables — a strategy usually employed in Arabic. Their performance on the stress identification task was much better than the production task but still gave problems, especially with tri- and tetrasyllabic utterances. Syllabi have to comprise stress drills in conjunction with their L1 stress patterns to help them overcome their difficulties in stressing English words.