In this session, we look at the importance of stress in determining the intelligibility of student pronunciation. One of four main components of the suprasegmental features of pronunciation, stress is often overlooked in our teaching of pronunciation. Because English is a stress-timed language, however, stress plays an important role in English pronunciation. Interestingly, the main student challenge is not putting stress on syllables or words, but unstressing those syllables or words that should NOT be stressed, hence the concept of ‘unstress’ that we explore.
This session was developed and first presented by Silvia Rossi of Mount Royal University, Calgary, Alberta.