Cover Image

The level of awareness and production of English lexical stress among English language teacher trainees in Malaysia

The realisation of lexical stress among Malaysian speakers of English is likely to be different from other varieties of English. In spite of this, there is a preference for a native pronunciation model in the teaching of English in Malaysia. In relation to this issue, this paper focuses on lexical s...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Adnan, Ernie, Pillai, Stefanie, Chiew, Poh Shin
Format: Article
Published: Indonesia University of Education 2019
Subjects:
L Education (General)
PE English
Online Access:http://eprints.um.edu.my/24307/
https://doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v9i1.15767
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
id my.um.eprints.24307
record_format eprints
spelling my.um.eprints.243072020-05-18T04:17:11Z http://eprints.um.edu.my/24307/ The level of awareness and production of English lexical stress among English language teacher trainees in Malaysia Adnan, Ernie Pillai, Stefanie Chiew, Poh Shin L Education (General) PE English The realisation of lexical stress among Malaysian speakers of English is likely to be different from other varieties of English. In spite of this, there is a preference for a native pronunciation model in the teaching of English in Malaysia. In relation to this issue, this paper focuses on lexical stress among a group of Teaching of English as a Second Language teacher trainees. The objectives of this paper are to assess the overall level of awareness of lexical stress among them, to examine their production of lexical stress, and to determine the link between their level of awareness and production. The method used to elicit data for the first objective was a Lexical Stress Awareness Test (LSAT), completed by 104 teacher trainees. Data for the second objective were obtained by recording the trainees reading sentences containing test words. The findings from the LSAT indicate that most of the trainees have an intermediate level of awareness of English lexical stress. They were generally unable to describe the characteristics of a stressed syllable. In addition, the findings from the acoustic analysis of the recordings suggest that they did not have a systematic pattern of stressing syllables with the main correlate of stress being vowel lengthening. In contrast, most of them chose 'higher pitch' as the characteristic of a stressed syllable. Hence, there is an inconsistency between their awareness and production of lexical stress in English. We discuss the implications of these findings in relation to the teaching of pronunciation in the classroom and the effect of lexical stress placement on intelligibility. Our general conclusion is that more attention needs to be given in teacher education to how lexical stress is used in English, and also to the characteristics of stress in the Malaysian variety of English. © 2018, IJAL. Indonesia University of Education 2019 Article PeerReviewed Adnan, Ernie and Pillai, Stefanie and Chiew, Poh Shin (2019) The level of awareness and production of English lexical stress among English language teacher trainees in Malaysia. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 9 (1). pp. 98-107. ISSN 2301-9468 https://doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v9i1.15767 doi:10.17509/ijal.v9i1.15767
institution Universiti Malaya
building UM Library
collection Institutional Repository
continent Asia
country Malaysia
content_provider Universiti Malaya
content_source UM Research Repository
url_provider http://eprints.um.edu.my/
topic L Education (General)
PE English
spellingShingle L Education (General)
PE English
Adnan, Ernie
Pillai, Stefanie
Chiew, Poh Shin
The level of awareness and production of English lexical stress among English language teacher trainees in Malaysia
description The realisation of lexical stress among Malaysian speakers of English is likely to be different from other varieties of English. In spite of this, there is a preference for a native pronunciation model in the teaching of English in Malaysia. In relation to this issue, this paper focuses on lexical stress among a group of Teaching of English as a Second Language teacher trainees. The objectives of this paper are to assess the overall level of awareness of lexical stress among them, to examine their production of lexical stress, and to determine the link between their level of awareness and production. The method used to elicit data for the first objective was a Lexical Stress Awareness Test (LSAT), completed by 104 teacher trainees. Data for the second objective were obtained by recording the trainees reading sentences containing test words. The findings from the LSAT indicate that most of the trainees have an intermediate level of awareness of English lexical stress. They were generally unable to describe the characteristics of a stressed syllable. In addition, the findings from the acoustic analysis of the recordings suggest that they did not have a systematic pattern of stressing syllables with the main correlate of stress being vowel lengthening. In contrast, most of them chose 'higher pitch' as the characteristic of a stressed syllable. Hence, there is an inconsistency between their awareness and production of lexical stress in English. We discuss the implications of these findings in relation to the teaching of pronunciation in the classroom and the effect of lexical stress placement on intelligibility. Our general conclusion is that more attention needs to be given in teacher education to how lexical stress is used in English, and also to the characteristics of stress in the Malaysian variety of English. © 2018, IJAL.
format Article
author Adnan, Ernie
Pillai, Stefanie
Chiew, Poh Shin
author_facet Adnan, Ernie
Pillai, Stefanie
Chiew, Poh Shin
author_sort Adnan, Ernie
title The level of awareness and production of English lexical stress among English language teacher trainees in Malaysia
title_short The level of awareness and production of English lexical stress among English language teacher trainees in Malaysia
title_full The level of awareness and production of English lexical stress among English language teacher trainees in Malaysia
title_fullStr The level of awareness and production of English lexical stress among English language teacher trainees in Malaysia
title_full_unstemmed The level of awareness and production of English lexical stress among English language teacher trainees in Malaysia
title_sort level of awareness and production of english lexical stress among english language teacher trainees in malaysia
publisher Indonesia University of Education
publishDate 2019
url http://eprints.um.edu.my/24307/
https://doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v9i1.15767
_version_ 1669007989597536256
score 13.211869

Similar Items