Game-based Teaching of Stress Placement on Multi-syllabic English Words

Accurate pronunciation is an important component of language ability and the main outward linguistic sign of whether someone is a native speaker of a language or not. An area of particular difficulty for Persian-speaking learners of English, which may cause 'foreign accent' or misunderstanding in speaking, is placement of stress on multi-syllable words. Game-based pronunciation teaching can be a pedagogical option to tackle that problematic feature of English pronunciation as it incorporates both implicit and explicit approaches to instruction. This study, therefore, investigates the effects of using a pronunciation game on learning stress placement on multi-syllable English words by young Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Fifty-two intermediate EFL learners were randomly selected through administration of Preliminary English Test (PET) and divided into two groups: the experimental group (group A) containing 27 students and the control group (Group B) containing 25 students. The experimental group received game-based instruction and materials for eight class sessions. Two weeks after the final class, a post-test was conducted to find out the changes. The results showed a significant difference between the performance of experimental and control groups on the post-test. The experimental group outperformed the control group and indicated quite positive attitudes towards the use of the gamebased learning of pronunciation. The researchers recommend using such games to EFL teachers in order to motivate and help their students learn pronunciation more effectively.

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