Article published In: Journal of Second Language Pronunciation
Vol. 9:3 (2023) ► pp.302–311
Teaching contrastive stress to lower-proficiency learners
Published online: 11 January 2024
https://doi.org/10.1075/jslp.23049.lev
https://doi.org/10.1075/jslp.23049.lev
Abstract
This article looks at the decisions behind teaching contrastive stress in a 2018 article by the author. The teaching of prosody can include areas like lexical stress, intonation, prominence, rhythm, etc., either in aggregate or by focusing on a specific feature, such as contrastive stress, the focus of this paper. Contrastive stress is often taught using written texts that require learners to understand the content of the texts as well as to identify the pronunciation issues in reading those texts aloud. The decisions made for this study were driven by the target learner population, low-intermediate learners of English, who were very much less likely to be able to carry out both of these tasks. As a result, the study was built around the use of pictures that could be used to compare and contrast without reading.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The pedagogy of teaching contrastive stress
- 3.The central pedagogical approach for our 2018 study
- 3.1Teaching approach and teachers
- 3.2Materials
- 4.Overall teaching plan
- 5.Evaluation
References
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