An Error Analysis Of English Word Stress

English has gained greater popularity and importance because of China's rapid development and its more and more contact with the rest of the world.For many Chinese EFL learners,senior high school students in particular,English has been an essential need for their further study or career.However,under the influence of the negative transfer of native language,Chinese students have great difficulties in English stress.Therefore,this study is designed to illustrate and summarize the Chinese senior high school students' errors and deviations of English word stress assignment by making a comparison with native speakers with the help of Praat.The author collects and processes sound samples,makes detailed acoustic analysis and data analysis of participants' English word stress problems from different perspectives.Meanwhile,the paper test data work as a supplement,the author elaborates error types of English word stress,such as mispronouncing homographs of different word classes;mispronouncing derivative words analogized from previously learned words;assigning wrong word stress to polysyllabic words,etc.This thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One,Introduction,introduces significance,objective and organization of the thesis.Chapter Two,Literature Review,presents the basic concepts of English word stress theory(including the definition of stress,levels of stress,word stress rules),second language acquisition theories(including contrastive analysis,error analysis and language transfer)and previous studies on acquisition of L2 stress both at home and abroad.Chapter Three,Research Methodology,including research questions and research design,introduces in detail how the research was conducted and how the data were collected and analyzed.Chapter Four,Analysis and Discussions,is the most important part of this thesis.By answering the research questions raised by the authors,it reports the major findings including Chinese EFL learners' word stress problems concerning both recording and paper data analysis.For instance,the types of errors in English word stress mainly include:(1)mispronouncing words with affixes;(2)mispronouncing derivative words analogized from previously learned words;(3)mispronouncing homographs of different word classes;(4)mispronouncing words with special suffixes(-ology,-ist,-ical,etc.);(5)mispronouncing compound words;(6)mispronouncing stress in polysyllabic words,etc.Meanwhile,the paper data analysis part,serving as a supplement,aims to provide more detailed results to reach at the conclusion of the recording test.Chapter Five,Conclusion,summarizes the major findings of the research and probes into some pedagogical implications.Also,some limitations have been pointed out in the end,wishing to give some useful suggestions for the future research.It is hoped that the thesis may cast light on English pronunciation teaching and learning in China,especially in the acquisition of English word stress patterns.Thus,some pedagogical implications and suggestions are given.This thesis also tries to be helpful to further the research on English phonetics teaching and learning.