An Investigation Of Chinese EFL Learners’ Word Stress Performance And Its Relationship With Their Pronunciation Learning Strategies

As the foundation of English pronunciation, word stress plays a more and more important role in foreign language teaching and learning and in communication. Word stress displacement, however, is often plagued by Chinese EFL learners, leading to mispronunciation and even to the failure of communication. Relevant studies at home and abroad mainly cover two aspects: theoretical studies and empirical studies. The former focuses on the definitions, the rules of English word stress and contrastive studies on Chinese-English word stress, while the latter touches upon such topics as the factors resulting in the displacement of word stress. Although the research on influential factors is relatively mature, covering many aspects, pronunciation learning strategy, which is closely related to pronunciation acquisition, has rarely been touched upon.Adopting both quantitative and qualitative methods, this study explores word stress performance by Chinese EFL learners, attempting to find out learners’ error tendency in production and perception. It also tries to explore their situation of using pronunciation learning strategies and its relationship with their performance in word stress. To achieve these goals, the study examines:(1) The overall performance of Chinese EFL learners in producing and perceiving word stress;(2) The general characteristics of using pronunciation learning strategies by Chinese EFL learners;(3) The relationship between word stress performance and the application of PLS.Participants in the current study are 55 English major sophomores in a university in Jiangsu Province. They were required to complete three tasks in producing 24 words, and perceiving another 24 words. They were also asked to fill out a pronunciation learning strategy questionnaire adapted from versions by Peterson(2000) and Mo(2011). Four participants took the in-depth interview.Findings of this study are:(1) In production performance, participants’ error frequency becomes higher with the increase of the syllable number, and there is significant correlation between two variables. With the increasing of assistance degree in the three production tasks, participants’ performance becomes better and better from Task 1 to Task 3, even getting full scores in Task 3, with significant difference among the performances in these tasks. Learners tend to displace on the words with different classes and ones with different variations. In perception experiment, apart from the similar error tendencies as those in productions, participants tend to displace the stress on the first syllable in all types of stress patterns. As to the relationship between productions and perception, the results indicate that there exists positive correlation. And there are some similarities in error tendency.(2) In using pronunciation learning strategies, learners remain at medium level. The frequency of using each category of strategies is ordered as: affective strategies > social strategies > cognitive strategies > meta-cognitive strategies > compensation strategies > memory strategies.(3) On the whole, there exists positive correlation between production, perception and pronunciation learning strategies. And the Multiple Regression analysis further demonstrates that only cognitive strategies play the dominant role in predicting the performances in productions and perception. The study concludes with the suggestion that in the process of learning and teaching English word stress, learners should enhance the consciousness of pronunciation learning strategies use, while teachers should guide them how to appropriately make use of strategies to avoid or reduce the displacement of word stress.