A Potential Solution to Chinese Students’ Unintelligible English Accent: A Study of the Effectiveness of a Stress Placement Intervention to Improve Chinese English Speakers’ Lexical Pronunciation
Due to a lack of authentic learning resources, Chinese students often do
not receive native pronunciation models in their classes. This study provided
Chinese students with an approach to improve their English pronunciation, specifically to sound more like British Received
Pronunciation (RP) or General American English
Pronunciation (GAEP). The study proposes word stress prediction rules to help non-native Chinese
learners predict the primary word stress of English words, improving
their vocabulary pronunciation. Repeated-measures
tests confirmed the effectiveness of this model, and statistical results
showed that these rules were both applicable and teachable. These rules successfully enabled Chinese English
learners to stress the correct vowel in a new English word without
consulting a dictionary. Chinese students can
rely on these rules for predicting the word stress of dictionary words, enabling them to pronounce new words as accurately
as possible to native speakers.
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