Cambodian Students’ Challenges with English Word Stress and Strategies to Deal With Pronouncing Word Stress

Abstract

Word stress plays an important role in intelligibility and deserves to be studied in all English classes not just pronunciation classes and by all students regardless of their general language proficiency level. At a word level, stress in English is phonemic since the location of the stress could differentiate the meaning of words. Mispronounce word stress could cause miscommunication. The aim of this study is to explore Cambodian students’ problem with pronouncing English word stress in ITC and assesses the effectiveness of four word-stress teaching strategies. The participants were 23 students studying English subject at the Institute of Technology of Cambodia (ITC) and ten English teachers were recruited in this study. After screening the participants, 15 students were given four stress-learning methods as a supplement to a 48-hour English course. The learners were pre-and post-tested by the researcher. Interview was conducted two times before and after the instructions. Results indicate that most participants had problem with four–syllable words. The finding also revealed that rubber band strategy was the most suitable strategy to teach word stress.