A Potential Solution to Unintelligible English Accent: an Orthoepic Study of the Effectiveness of Stress Placement Intervention for Chinese English Speakers

Abstract

Although English has continued to grow as a major language spoken internationally, many non-native speakers have found learning to say English vocabulary correctly difficult because of proper word stress placement. This study was conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of word stress rules, created by Canadian linguist George Waldo (1968), in improving the pronunciation of English by Chinese college students. Given the problems associated with the pronunciation of English by nonnative American speakers. The purposes of this research were two-fold.