• Mohammad Jafar Jabbari

  Author

• Zahra Nazari

  Author

The present study investigates the stress patterns of Iranian English language learners’
pronunciation. More precisely, this study was an attempt to investigate the effect of two
approaches of teaching word stress patterns (implicit through listening to audio record by native
Americans and explicit through focus on word stress patterns and instructing it) on the learners’
pronunciation. For this purpose, 60 intermediate EFL learners studying in several English
language institutes in Yasouj were selected, and assigned to two matched groups, on the basis of
their language proficiency test scores. A pronunciation pretest was administered to all the
participants. The experimental groups received explicit focus on word stress patterns through
the book on pronunciation, and the comparison group received implicit focus on prosodic
features with no obvious emphasis on word stress. A pronunciation posttest was then
administered; the data gathered from the pretest and posttest included accuracy scores for the
oral production of word stress, and the percentage of all accuracy scores. In this study, explicit
teaching of word stress pattern turned out to cause more gains in pronunciation accuracy in
comparison with implicit instruction. The results of the research demonstrates that the accuracy
of pronouncing word stress obtained in posttest in the experimental group (i.e. explicit approach
group) is higher than that of the comparison group.

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