A Survey Study of Ramkhamhaeng University Students’ Problems of Stress in English

Abstract

The purposes of this study are (1) to investigate the effect of five hours of pronunciation practice with a native speaker, given to learners enrolled in an English pronunciation course, and then compare their pronunciation ability in pre- and posttests, and (2) to find out which words and phrases with two to four syllables the students were able to correctly pronounce the stress in. The participants were 20 Thai undergraduates of mixed abilities from the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Business Administration, Ramkhamhaeng University, who had registered to study the subject ENG 2101, English Pronunciation, in the second semester of 2020. The instruments used for collecting the data were two tests, a pretest and a posttest. Both pretest and posttest consisted of Part 1 and Part 2. In Part 1, there were 20 words, ranging from two-syllable words and phrases up to four-syllable ones, and in Part 2, those 20 words and phrases were put in 20 sentences. Both pretest and posttest had the same content. Data analysis was based on descriptive statistics: average, percentage, and standard deviation, as well as inferential statistics using a Paired Sample t-Test. The findings are as follows: 1) After having done the five hours of English pronunciation practice, by watching a native speaker’s video clip focusing on word syllable stress, the participants significantly improved at 0.01 level. The correlation between the receptive skill and productive skill of the pretest and posttest is at 0.01 level. 2) The results show that most of the students could pronounce the words with two syllables, it is noticeable that fewer than 50% of the students were able to pronounce the two-syllable phrase “take off,” and only a few students were able to pronounce the three-syllable word “employee” correctly in every part of the pretest and posttest. It is noteworthy that among the words that fewer than 50% of the students could pronounce correctly, the following four-syllable words – duality, biology, politician and appreciate – are words that more students could pronounce correctly than the word “employee.”