An Investigation into the Learners’ Awareness of Word-Level Stress

Abstract

As a result of a relative unpredictability of word stress pattern in English, there seems to be no consensus whether word stress should be incorporated into pronunciation instruction. Moreover, exactly how beneficial the learner’s conscious, declarative knowledge is to the acquisition of a foreign language phonological system remains to be confirmed. The present paper reports on a preliminary investigation into the learners’ awareness of lexical stress. The study was conducted among twenty-two Polish learners of English (N = 22), whose command of word stress was assessed by means of written, perception, and production tests. These three, different types of testing methods were hypothesized to be related to a different degree to either explicit, or implicit processing. The results revealed a positive correlation between the level of the subjects’ awareness and their written pronunciation test scores. No correlation was found between the level of the learners’ declarative knowledge and their production abilities. Finally, t test calculation for perception test scores brought ambiguous results; therefore, further investigation is required in order to verify the existence of interdependence between the learners’ awareness and their perceptual abilities.