A Study On The Acquisition Of English Word Stress Of Middle School Students And Teaching Strategies

According to the requirements of the English Curriculum Standard,junior high school students need to acquire proficiency in English communication.As a result,oral English become increasingly important in English learning nowadays.However,many students have a lot of problems with the pronunciation.One reason of this phenomenon is that they fail to know the pronunciation features of English.Previous researchers mostly focus on the phonemic features of English.There are few studies about the acquisition of word stress for junior high school students.With the help of error analysis theory,this thesis analyzes the errors that occur in the acquisition process of word stress,and tries to find out the reasons for the errors.Finally,it put forward some teaching strategies to overcome the errors.In the research,forty junior students are randomly selected as the test subjects.The qualitative and quantitative methods are used to investigate the acquisition situation of word stress for junior high school students.This thesis mainly tries to solve the following three questions.1.What errors do Chinese junior high school students make in the acquisition of word stress? 2.What causes are responsible for the word stress errors? 3.What teaching strategies can be used to overcome the errors on English word stress?The results of the research show that the acquisition rate of word stress for junior high school students is quite low.In the process of acquisition,the error rate of polysyllabic words is higher than that of disyllabic words and the error rate of adjectives and nouns is much higher than those of other part of speech.In addition,students have trouble with the word stress acquisition of compound words and words with functional stress shift.The main cause of the errors is the influence of negative transfer of Chinese.Besides,the language awareness of students and teachers is also of great importance.Teachers and students do not have the awareness of the significance of English word stress.According to these problems,some teaching strategies are put forward to overcome the errors.Firstly,the awareness of the significance of word stress should be raised by teachers and students.Secondly,teachers' professional ability should be improved.Thirdly,new teaching methods can be used for the class.For example,some software can be used to visualize the pronunciation and help students find errors and correct it promptly.Finally,schools should have phonetic lessons andthe phonetic lessons should be connected with other form of English class to improve the pronunciation of students.This thesis can help students to find out their problems with English word stress and find the reasons for the problems.On this basis,this article proposes some teaching strategies that can help to overcome the error of word stress,which is helpful for learning and teaching stress knowledge.