An Analysis Of Postgraduate Students’ Errors In English Word Stress Assignment

Chinese English learners’ English pronunciation has an obvious “Chinese accent”,which is often caused by problems in stress assignments.Chinese English learners have stress assignment errors in various English word categories,such as disyllabic and polysyllabic words,compound words,homonyms,and different parts of speech,which were only partly mentioned in previous studies.Moreover,there have been many studies on subjects from primary school to university,but there are only limited studies on postgraduates.Therefore,this study focuses on postgraduate students’ English word stress errors and analyzes them from various English word categories to study their English word stress assignment errors.To realize the purpose of this study,the following three research questions are set up:(1)What word stress assignment errors did postgraduate students make in the paper and reading tests?(2)Why did they make these errors?(3)What suggestions can help them avoid these errors?This study selected 30 postgraduate students from Yanbian University as subjects for the English word stress errors study.The research consists of three steps: First,the words are selected according to different types of English words,including disyllabic and polysyllabic words,words of different parts of speech,compound words,homographs of different word classes,and words with affixes.The second step is the collection of experimental data for the tests.The experiment consists of two tests.The first paper test is used to study students’ mastery of English word stress.The second reading test is used to study and summarize the errors of word stress assignments.The third step is data analysis.Firstly,statistical analysis is used to analyze the results of the two tests to understand the overall situation of stress acquisition.Then the qualitative analysis is used to find specific errors in word stress assignment.Finally,the results are analyzed and discussed in combination with word stress assignment rules.The experimental results show that Chinese English learners tend to overstress word stress assignments,such as stressing two words in compound words.In addition,there are many errors in the stress assignment of uncommon parts of speech in homonyms,indicating that the rules of stress assignment are not mastered.In addition,the less the influence of suffixes on stress,the more difficult it is for Chinese English learners to assign stress,and they tend to assign stress to the added affixes.Through the analysis and summary of the problems of word stress in students,combined with the questionnaire,this paper analyzes the reasons for the problems of English stress assignment of postgraduate students and finds out that the fundamental reason for it is that English and Chinese have two different rhythmic patterns.English is stress-timed,and English words have stressed syllables and unstressed syllables.Conversely,Chinese is syllable-timed,and the duration between syllables is the same.In addition,the results of the test and questionnaire showed that the subjects had insufficient knowledge and awareness of English word stress.Finally,the author gives some suggestions for improvement,hoping to contribute to the research of pronunciation teaching for postgraduate students.