Teaching contrastive stress to lower-proficiency learners

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.