A SARJANA PENDIDIKAN THESIS Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements to Obtain the Sarjana Pendidikan Degree in English Language Education

  WORD STRESS ERRORS IN STUDENTS’ ORAL PRODUCTION A SARJANA PENDIDIKAN THESIS Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements to Obtain the Sarjana Pendidikan Degree in English Language Education By Ludmila Martha

  Student Number: 081214037

ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION STUDY PROGRAM DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGE AND ARTS EDUCATION FACULTY OF TEACHERS TRAINING AND EDUCATION SANATA DHARMA UNIVERSITY YOGYAKARTA 2012

  WORD STRESS ERRORS IN STUDENTS’ ORAL PRODUCTION A SARJANA PENDIDIKAN THESIS Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements to Obtain the Sarjana Pendidikan Degree in English Language Education By Ludmila Martha

  Student Number: 081214037

ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION STUDY PROGRAM DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGE AND ARTS EDUCATION FACULTY OF TEACHERS TRAINING AND EDUCATION SANATA DHARMA UNIVERSITY YOGYAKARTA 2012

  

ABSTRACT

Martha, Ludmila. 2012. Word Stress Errors in Students’ Oral Production.

  

Yogyakarta: English Language Education Study Program, Department of

Language and Arts Education, Faculty of Teachers Training and Education,

Sanata Dharma University.

  This study investigates the word stress production among fifth semester

students of English Language Education Study Program in Sanata Dharma

University. Two research questions are addressed: (1) What are the types of word

stress errors produced by the students? (2) How do English learners overcome the

word stress errors? Content analysis is employed as the research method because this research

uses a video of the play performance titled The Good Woman of Setzuan. The

script of the play performance is already available that the writer could listen

carefully to the students’ pronunciation while checking the play performance’s

script in order to make the process easier. To collect the data, the writer uses some

theories to help find the word stress error and compares the students’ word stress

productions to the transcriptions in the dictionary. Afterwards, the writer

transcribes the students’ word stress by listening carefully to the students’ oral

production. How the students place the stress is also observed by the writer in

order to analyze the data.

  The results of this research show that there are two types of word stress

errors. The first type of error produced by the students is misplaced word stress. In

this error, the stress falls on the wrong syllable of the word. The second type of

error is unnecessary word stress. This error happens to the word which has more

than one primary stress, including the placement of stress on the correct syllable.

Afterwards, there are some ways which are helpful for the learners to overcome

the word stress errors. Firstly, students should master the phonetic transcription in

order to understand how to pronunce words based on the dictionaries which use

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Secondly, students need to consult the

dictionary for the placement of the word stress. Thirdly, it is important to listen to

audio pronunciations and to practice the pronunciation in order to develop the

pronunciation skills. The fourth action is to be aware of different stresses of words

to avoid misunderstanding in communication.

  Keywords: word stress, error, oral production

  

ABSTRAK

Martha, Ludmila. 2012. Word Stress Errors in Students’ Oral Production.

  

Yogyakarta: Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris, Jurusan Pendidikan

Bahasa dan Seni, Fakultas Keguruan dan Ilmu Pendidikan, Universitas Sanata

Dharma.

  Studi ini meneliti pengucapan tekanan kata di kalangan mahasiswa

semester lima Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris di Universitas Sanata

Dharma. Ada dua pertanyaan penelitian yang dibahas: (1) Apa jenis kesalahan

tekanan kata yang dihasilkan oleh mahasiswa? (2) Bagaimana pembelajar Bahasa

Inggris dapat mengatasi kesalahan-kesalahan tekanan kata tersebut?

  Content analysis digunakan sebagai metode penelitian karena penelitian

ini menggunakan video play performance berjudul The Good Woman of Setzuan.

  

Naskah play performance sudah tersedia sehingga penulis dapat mendengarkan

dengan cermat pengucapan mahasiswa seraya memeriksa naskah untuk membuat

proses penelitian lebih mudah. Untuk mengumpulkan data, penulis menggunakan

beberapa teori untuk membantu menemukan kesalahan tekanan kata dan

membandingkan produksi tekanan kata mahasiswa terhadap transkrip dalam

kamus. Setelah itu, penulis menuliskan tekanan kata mahasiswa dengan

mendengarkan pengucapan lisan mahasiswa dengan hati-hati. Bagaimana para

mahasiswa menempatkan tekanan juga diamati oleh penulis untuk menganalisis

data.

  Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa ada dua jenis kesalahan tekanan

kata. Jenis kesalahan pertama yang dihasilkan oleh mahasiswa yaitu kesalahan

penempatan tekanan kata. Dalam kesalahan ini, tekanan ditempatkan pada suku

kata yang salah. Jenis kesalahan kedua yaitu tekanan kata yang tidak perlu.

Kesalahan ini terjadi pada kata yang memiliki lebih dari satu tekanan, termasuk

penempatan tekanan pada suku kata yang benar. Setelah itu, ada beberapa cara

yang berguna bagi peserta didik untuk mengatasi kesalahan pada tekanan kata.

Pertama, siswa sebaiknya menguasai phonetic transcription untuk memahami

bagaimana mengucapkan kata-kata berdasarkan kamus yang menggunakan

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Kedua, siswa perlu memeriksa kamus

untuk penempatan tekanan kata. Ketiga, penting bagi siswa untuk mendengarkan

audio pengucapan dan berlatih untuk mengembangkan keterampilan pengucapan

mereka. Yang keempat yaitu menyadari akan tekanan kata yang berbeda-beda

untuk menghindari kesalahpahaman dalam komunikasi.

  Kata kunci: word stress, error, oral production

  There can be miracles When you believe Though hope is frail It's hard to kill Who knows what miracles You can achieve When you believe, somehow you will You will when you believe

• Mariah Carey & Whitney Houston – This thesis is dedicated to my mother, my father, my brother, my close friends, and all who love me with their limitless support, encouragement, and prayer.

  

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, praises and thanks be to Lord Jesus Christ for His abundant

blessings, love, and strength that He has given to me. I believe that this thesis

could not be finished without His guidance and grace.

  My next words go to my major sponsor, Mr. Barli Bram. I deeply thank

him for having read, discussed, and commented on my thesis with such careful

attention. I also greatly appreciate his valuable time, suggestions, and motivation

during the process of completing this thesis and also his constructive input and

support to the very end.

  My deepest thanks also go to the students who performed the play

performance The Good Woman of Setzuan for helping me obtain the video of the

play performance. Without their help, this study would have been impossible.

  I am much indebted to my friend, Sasa. In particular, I am thankful for the

support, knowledge transfer, opinions, and productive discussions. I also thank

her enthusiasm, comments, and willingness to proofread my thesis. We have

shared much of our time together in revising and consulting our thesis.

  I would also like to thank the members of my family. I thank my parents

as well as my brother for encouraging me to complete my education. I am

immensely grateful for the continuous prayers, understanding, support, and

patience. In the middle of my struggle, they have loved me and stood by me. I

love them forever.

  I also want to express my gratitude to my friends who have shown interest

and encouragement, especially Nieza, Liza, Octa, Deby, Pita, Anggi, Levyn, Irine,

Sinta, Diah, Tia, Siana, Siwi, Carol, Adi, and Dimas. I thank them for

encouraging me and having given me useful information. I also thank Steve, who

has reminded me to give my best in finishing this thesis. I thank his motivational

support in the toughest moments.

  Finally, I have to say that I am happy to have arrived here, to the end of

this long path, in which I have learned a lot. To many other names that I could not

mention one by one, I now wish to say a profound thank-you for all the prayers

and support. God bless all of us.

  Ludmila Martha

  

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

HALAMAN JUDUL.......................................................................................... i

  

HALAMAN PENGESAHAN............................................................................ ii

STATEMENT OF WORK’S ORIGINALITY .................................................. iv

LEMBAR PERNYATAAN PERSETUJUAN PUBLIKASI................................... v

ABSTRACT....................................................................................................... vi

ABSTRAK ........................................................................................................... vii

DEDICATION PAGE........................................................................................viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................... ix

TABLE OF CONTENTS................................................................................... xi

LIST OF TABLES .............................................................................................xiii

LIST OF APPENDICES ....................................................................................xiv

  CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION A. Research Background .................................................................. 1 B. Research Problems ...................................................................... 4 C. Problem Limitation...................................................................... 4 D. Research Objectives .................................................................... 4 E. Research Benefits ........................................................................ 5 F. Definition of Terms ..................................................................... 6 CHAPTER II: REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE A. Theoretical Description ............................................................... 8

  1. Overview of Word ................................................................. 8

  2. Word Stress............................................................................ 10

  a. The Nature of Word Stress .............................................. 10

  b. The Importance of Word Stress....................................... 12

  3. Word Stress Rules ................................................................. 13

  b. Patterns of Word Stress ................................................... 14

  4. Errors in Word Stress ............................................................ 21

  B. Theoretical Framework................................................................ 23

  CHAPTER III: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY A. Research Method ......................................................................... 25 B. Research Setting .......................................................................... 26 C. Research Subjects ........................................................................ 26 D. Instruments and Data Gathering Technique ................................ 27 E. Data Analysis Technique............................................................. 28 F. Research Procedure ..................................................................... 29 CHAPTER IV: RESEARCH RESULTS AND DISCUSSION A. Research Results.......................................................................... 31 B. Discussion.................................................................................... 33 CHAPTER V: CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS A. Conclusions ................................................................................. 43 B. Recommendations ....................................................................... 44

REFERENCES................................................................................................... 46

APPENDICES ................................................................................................... 49

  

LIST OF TABLES

Table

  Page

  

3.1 Observation of Word Stress Error................................................................ 27

  

4.1 Occurrences of Word Stress Errors.............................................................. 32

LIST OF APPENDICES

  Appendix Page

  

1. Observation Table ........................................................................................ 50

  

2. Play Performance Script............................................................................... 52

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This chapter consists of six major sections, namely, the research

  

background, research problems, problem limitation, research objectives, research

benefits, and definition of terms.

A. Research Background

  Pronunciation plays an indispensable role in intelligibility, as Burns &

Seidlhofer (2002, p. 212) say that pronunciation is “responsible for ‘intelligibility’

• – whether or not we can get our message across.” Kenworthy (1987, p. 13)

  defines intelligibility as “being understood by a listener at a given time in a given

  situation.” If this is the case, the purpose of intelligible pronunciation itself is to

  understand and to be understood. Connectedly, Morley (1991, p. 488) claims that

  “intelligible pronunciation is an essential component of communication

  competence.” Therefore, a speaker’s pronunciation is important in communication

  since it can determine whether the speaker’s remark is comprehensible to the

  listener or not.

  In teaching and learning process, pronunciation cannot be underestimated

because it is one of some important components which English learners need to

master. Accordingly, Harmer (2001, p. 183) argues that “concentrating on sounds,

showing where they are made in the mouth, making students aware of where

words should be stressed – all these things give them extra information about

  

spoken English and help them achieve the goal of improved comprehension and

intelligibility.” Thus, pronunciation is a crucial component in English and either

teachers or students need to pay it close attention.

  Pronunciation also cannot be separated from stress. The stress is important

because different stress placements on some words might change the words’

meaning, such as in the word desert. When the word is stressed on the first

syllable, it means “barren land, waterless and treeless, often sand-covered”

(Hornby, 1974, p. 234), but when it is stressed on the second syllable, it means

“leave; go a way from” (Hornby, 1974, p. 233). Furthermore, the word stress can

also change the word’s part of speech, such as in the word import. When the word

is stressed on the first syllable, it is a noun, but when it is stressed on the second

syllable, it is a verb.

  Gilbert (2005, p. 15) shows a scene that illustrates the kind of confusion

which can result from word stress error. Gilbert (2005, p. 15) states that it

happened in the United States when a Japanese customer tried to buy an electronic

gadget, so he asked the clerk for a “regista.” However, the clerk did not

understand what the customer meant. The customer then recognized that there was

something wrong with his pronunciation, so this time he tried again by carefully

pronouncing the final consonant.

  Customer: Register? Clerk: (looking at the cash register) Excuse me? Customer: (trying a change of vowel) Rahgista? Clerk: Sir? Customer: (deciding the problem was the /dj/ sound) Rahzista! Clerk: (impatiently) I’m sorry, we don’t have anything like that. Customer: (furious) Right here! Look at this picture! A rahzista!

  “The above incident illustrates how errors in word stress can create serious

barriers to intelligibility, even when the individual sounds in a word are

pronounced correctly or near correctly” (Gilbert, 2005, p. 15). Similarly,

Kenworthy (1987, p. 28) also explains that correct word stress is very important

for English learners because “if a non-native speaker produces a word with the

wrong stress pattern, an English listener may have great difficulty in

understanding the word, even if most of individual sounds have been well

pronounced.”

  For learners, “the making of errors can be regarded as a device the learner

uses in order to learn” (Selinker, 1992, p. 150). In this case, errors in foreign

language teaching are regarded as the cases which are difficult enough to avoid.

Therefore, investigation of errors in language learning is important since error is

an unavoidable case for learners.

  Regarding the explanations above, this research attempts to discuss ESL

(English as a Second Language) students’ word stress errors when doing the play

performance The Good Woman of Setzuan. Therefore, this research investigates

the students’ oral production when uttering the play performance’s script. Play

performance is one of some subjects in Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta.

There have been many play performances conducted in this university which have

been starred by the students themselves. The Good Woman of Setzuan was one of

five play performances which were conducted in 2010. The reason why the writer

chooses this play performance is because the script of the students’ play

B. Research Problems There are two research problems which are addressed in this research.

  They are formulated as follows:

  1. What are the types of word stress errors produced by the students?

  2. How do English learners overcome the word stress errors?

  C. Problem Limitation This study is going to discuss the word stress errors produced by the

students when uttering the dialogue of the play performance. The stress in the

discourse can occur in sentence level and word level. In this case, the writer limits

this study only on the word level because the error of word stress can be checked

through the dictionary. Meanwhile, the misplacing or error of stress on the

sentence level “will lead to a change in the sentence's focus, and depending on the

context may have considerable pragmatic effects, but it will not produce an

anomalous sentence” (Cutler, 1980, p. 74). In other words, the sentence stress is

related to the focus or context of the sentence and cannot be checked through the

dictionary because it is related to the speaker’s intention.

  D. Research Objectives The objectives of this study are presented as follows:

  1. To find out the types of word stress errors which are produced by the students in their oral production.

  2. To seek how to overcome the word stress errors.

E. Research Benefits

  The writer expects that the investigation of this research will give

beneficial contributions for further education development. Hence, this section

discusses some benefits that might be given from this research. The first point is

for English teachers who implement teaching word stress to their students. The

second point is aimed for other researchers and the last point is for English

learners.

  1. The English Teachers By reading this study, the teachers may find some words that are

commonly spoken using incorrect word stress. Hopefully, these might become the

feedback or useful insights for teachers to overcome the students’ problems in

applying word stress and to facilitate their students in acquiring correct word

stress.

  2. Other Researchers The researcher hopes that this research could help future researches and

further discussions on the topic of word stress. In this case, the future researchers

may use this study as the basic knowledge to conduct their research.

  3. English Learners To English learners, especially English Language Education Study

Program’s students, pronunciation is one of the important subjects. Moreover,

English Language Education Study Program’s students are expected to be English

teachers so that they are expected to be good models. The researcher hopes that

this research improves the English learners’ knowledge about word stress and

  

helps them develop their skill or ability in stressing words correctly. By observing

the word stress errors from this research, the English learners may also avoid the

same errors and hopefully they could overcome similar errors in their daily

practice.

F. Definition of Terms

  In order to avoid misunderstanding, in this section the researcher discusses

several terms or concepts dealing with what the researcher intends to do

throughout this research. The important concepts used in this study are defined

below:

  1. Error Norrish (1987, p. 7) defines an error as “a systematic deviation when a

learner has not learnt something and consistently gets it wrong.” Error is different

from mistake because “a mistake refers to a performance error that is either

random guess or a ‘slip’, in that it is a failure to utilize a known system correctly”

(Brown, 2007, p. 257). Accordingly, it can be inferred that the difference between

errors and mistakes can be checked through the consistency. For instance, when

sometimes a speaker mispronounces a word and sometimes he/she pronounces the

word correctly, it is called a mistake. In contrast, if the speaker always

mispronounces the word, it is called an error.

  Meanwhile, the term error in this study refers to the kinds of errors on the

word stress placement which are produced by the students. As explained above,

  

the error happens consistently. Hence, the researcher carefully seeks the words

which have consistent errors.

  2. Oral Production The researcher aims to listen to the students’ oral production in order to

get the data. Consequently, oral production in this study refers to the students’

utterances. The utterances are taken from the recorded dialogues spoken by the

students in the play performance video.

3. Word Stress

  Stress is “a cover term for the combined effects of pitch, loudness, and length- the result of which is vowel prominence” (O’Grady & Dobrovolsky, 1987, p. 40).

  The word stress is done by “saying that syllable slightly louder, holding the vowel a little longer, and pronouncing the consonants very clearly” (Kenworthy, 1987, p. 10).

  Moreover, as mentioned in the limitation of this study, the stress discussed is only focused on the primary stress, which is the

  most prominent or the strongest type of

  Therefore, the term word stress in this research refers to the perceived stress. prominence of the certain syllable in a word which receives the primary stress.

CHAPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE In this chapter, the writer attempts to present the theoretical writings that

  

support this study. There are two sections that will be discussed in this chapter,

namely theoretical description and theoretical framework. In the theoretical

description, the writer presents the theories which are relevant to this research. In

the second section, the writer relates the theories to the research in order to obtain

a theoretical framework in conducting this study.

A. Theoretical Description

1. Overview of Word

  It is useful to divide words into two broad categories, namely closed and

open (Greenbaum & Quirk, 1990, p. 15). Jurafsky & Martin (2000) similarly state

that words can be divided into two big categories: closed class types and open

class types (p. 3).

  Greenbaum & Quirk (1990, p. 15) state that the closed classes, as the name

suggests, are words that are finite and often small with a membership that is

relatively stable or unchanging in the language. Jurafsky & Martin (2000) also

argue that closed classes are the ones that have relatively fixed membership, for

example prepositions are closed classes since there is a fixed set of them in

English and new prepositions are rarely coined (p. 3). Closed class words “are

also generally function words like of, it, and, or you, which tend to be very short,

  

occur frequently, and often have structuring uses in grammar” (Jurafsky & Martin,

2000, p. 3). Furthermore, Greenbaum & Quirk (1990, p. 16) state that the words

“play a major part in English grammar, often corresponding to inflections in some

other languages, and they are sometimes referred to as grammatical words,

function words , or structure words.”

  Greenbaum & Quirk (1990, p. 16) also list some of the important closed

classes with a few examples of each; they are pronoun, such as she, they,

anybody ; determiner, such as the, a, that, some; primary verb, such as be; modal

verb , such as can, might; preposition, such as in, during, round; and conjunction,

such as and, or, while, yet.

  In contrary, open classes of words are “constantly changing their

membership as old words drop out of the language and new ones are coined or

adopted to reflect cultural changes in society” (Greenbaum & Quirk, 1990, p. 16).

Jurafsky & Martin (2000) also state that open classes are continually coined or

borrowed from other languages, e.g. the new verb to fax or the borrowed noun

futon (p. 3). The numbers of open classes are vast and are the subject matter of

dictionaries and they are often called lexical words (Greenbaum & Quirk, 1990, p.

  16).

  Jurafsky & Martin (2000) claim that there are four major open classes;

namely nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs (p. 3). Noun is “the name given to

the syntactic class in which the words for most people, places, or things occur”

(Jurafsky & Martin, 2000, p. 3). Generally, what defines a noun in English are

“things like its ability to occur with determiners (a goat, its bandwidth, Plato’s

  

Republic ), to take possessives (IBM’s annual revenue), and for most but not all

nouns, to occur in the plural form (goats, abaci)” (Jurafsky & Martin, 2000, p. 4).

  

Next is verb class which is the class that “includes most of the words referring to

actions and processes, including main verbs like draw, provide, differ, and go”

(Jurafsky & Martin, 2000, p. 4). The third open class, adjective, semantically

“includes many terms that describe properties or qualities” (p. 4). The examples

are sufficient, happy, changeable, round (Greenbaum & Quirk, 1990, p. 16). The

final open class form, adverb, “has semantically may be solely that each of these

words can be viewed as modifying something (often verbs, hence the name

adverb , but also other adverbs and entire verb phrases)” (Jurafsky & Martin, 2000,

p. 5). The examples of adverbs are sufficiently, really, afterwards, yet (Greenbaum

& Quirk, 1990, p. 16).

2. Word Stress

a. The Nature of Word Stress

  Word stress is regarded as one of some pronunciation aspects, as

Kenworthy (1987, p. 9) states that several aspects of pronunciation are sounds,

combination of sounds, linkage of sounds, word stress, rhythm, weak forms,

sentence stress, and intonation. Another linguist, Meyer (2009), proposes that the

analysis of English speech sounds is focused on segmental and suprasegmental

features (p. 196). In this case, the analysis of speech segments “are focused on the

individual sounds in a given word” (Meyer, 2009, p.196), while “the study of

suprasegmentals extends the focus of inquiry to units that are larger than

  

individual segments – syllables, words, phrases, and clauses – and to the features

of sound that describe these units, specifically stress and intonation” (Meyer, 2009,

p. 208). Therefore, word stress itself is included as the part of suprasegmental

features.

  When we talk about stress, generally we talk about prominence or emphasis, as stated by Mateescu (2003): “It would be difficult maybe even for a specialist to give a very accurate definition of stress, but even a schoolchild will be intuitively aware that when we talk about stress in a word or in more complex structures we talk in fact about prominence, or emphasis, that is parts of that word or structures are perceived as having a higher degree of prominence in comparison to the others.” (p. 2) Daniel (1994) supports the statement above, stating that stress is “usually

perceived as greater loudness by the listener, with which one part of the word or

longer utterance is distinguished from the other parts” (p. 2). Moreover, “stress in

English words is relatively easy to perceive: stressed syllables are perceived as

‘more prominent’, or louder, or longer, or ‘more complex’, or produced with more

apparent effort, than the less stressed or unstressed syllables that might lie

adjacent to them” (McCully, 2009, p. 67).

  We may say that stressed syllables are recognized as stressed since they are

more prominent than the unstressed syllables, as Jones (1958, p. 141) states that

“syllables which are pronounced more forcibly than neighboring syllables are

generally said to be stressed.” In addition, “stress involves making vowels longer

and louder” (Avery & Ehrlich, 1992, p. 63). Thus, to put stress on a syllable in a

word, “we pronounce it with such force as to give it more importance than the

  

surrounding syllables and to make it stand out among them” (Prator & Robinett,

1972, p. 16).

  On the other hand, Kenworthy (2000, p. 51) provides four features

involved in the perception of prominence. The first feature is loudness, when the

stressed syllables are louder than unstressed ones; the second feature is length,

when the vowel in a syllable is held longer than the others; the third feature is

pitch , when there is a change of speed, either faster which results in a higher pitch

or slower which results in a lower pitch or some fluctuation in speed; and the last

one is quality, when a stressed syllable has a vowel that differs in quality from the

other syllables. To sum up, there are four important features that produce

prominence, namely loudness, length, pitch, and quality.

b. The Importance of Word Stress

  It is important to assign the right stress pattern, as Prator & Robinett (1972,

p. 16) say that stress is “the key to the pronunciation of an English word, and the

location of the accent should always be learned with the word.” Moreover, Prator

& Robinett (1972, p. 16) argue that if the wrong syllable is stressed, “it may be

quite impossible for anyone listening to understand what you are trying to say.” In

other words, it could make the communication unsuccessful.

  Furthermore, “an appropriate stress and rhythmic pattern is more

important for intelligibility than the correct pronunciation of isolated segments

and, in fact, stress and rhythm determine the pronunciation of segments in English”

(Sabater, 1991, p. 145). Sabater (1991, pp. 145-146) further explains that an

inappropriate accentual and rhythmic pattern of a word “makes the word

  

unintelligible not only because the misplaced main stress distorts the shape of the

word, but also because there is no unstressing of the other syllables with the

consequent phonetic reductions.” Accordingly, Celce-Murcia, Brinton, and Goodwin (1996, p. 1) claim that

“successful communication cannot take place without correct pronunciation.” In

other words, the correct pronunciation can shape the speaker’s success.

  

Conversely, the speaker’s poor pronunciation could make the listeners get the

wrong meaning and the communication can be unsuccessful. Therefore, the

pronunciation from the speaker and the recognition from the listener have great

influences on the quality of communication for both of the parties.

3. Word Stress Rules

a. Placement of Stress in Words

  Word stress tends to happen when an English word has more than one

syllable (Kenworthy, p. 10, 1987). Gilbert (2008) says that “a syllable is most

simply explained as something with a vowel sound at its center” (p. 4). Poldauf

(1984, p. 13) also says that “a monosyllable cannot have word-stress.” Another

linguist also claims that “as soon as an utterance is longer than a single syllable,

the syllables are arranged in rhythmic patterns comprising a succession of strong-

weak-strong-weak, etc; this is true whether the polysyllabic stretch is a sentence, a

phrase or a single word” (Quirk et al., 1972, p. 1036). Therefore, only two-

syllable words and polysyllabic words−“words of three or more syllables” (James,

2006, p. xiv) which can have stress.

  Zapata (2009) notes that there are two levels of word stress, namely

primary stress and secondary stress (p. 1). The syllable that is pronounced with

the greatest emphasis in a word receives the primary stress, while the syllable that

is pronounced with a little less emphasis than the one which has the primary stress

receives the secondary stress (Zapata, 2009, p. 1). For example, the monosyllabic

words ‘book’ and ‘speak’ have primary stress; the syllables pa- and -cause of the

dissyllabic words ‘paper’ and ‘because’ have primary stress; the syllables -ten- in

the word ‘attention’, -a- in the word ‘pronunciation’ and sec- in the word

‘secondary’ (which are polysyllabic words) have primary stress, while the

syllables -ary and -nun- have secondary stress (Zapata, 2009, p. 1).

  The placement of primary stress is unpredictable because it may fall to any syllable of a word, as Daniel (1994, p. 3) states that: Although the stresses are normally in a fixed position in a word, their position is unpredictable in the sense that there is no single position where the primary stress of the word can be expected to fall in

English. For example, to count from left to right, it may fall on the:

1st syllable: 'family 4th syllable: famili'arity

2nd syllable: fa'miliar 5th syllable: nationali'zation

3rd syllable: natio'nality 6th syllable : industriali'zation

Urbanczyk & Eady (1989, p. 28) claim that the main or primary stress rd nd

often occurs on the antepenultimate (3 to last) syllables and penultimate (2 to

last) syllable.

b. Patterns of Word Stress

  In the dictionary, we will find the phonetic transcription of the words since

the sounds of English are often displayed in the form of phonetic transcription

  

alphabet developed by the International Phonetic Association to provide suitable

symbols for the sounds of any language” (McArthur, 1992, p. 523). In this case,

“linguists use a set of symbols from the phonetic alphabet, an alphabet in which

each symbol corresponds to one (and only one) sound” (Meyer, 2009 p. 196). The

phonetic alphabet (or usually called phonetic transcription) will tell people the

pronunciation of words, while the mere spelling of words cannot do so. The