The Effectiveness of Placement of Sentence Stress in Intelligibility

Abstract

The present study aims at investigating the effectiveness of placement of sentence stress in intelligibility. The following points are considered to be objectives of the present study are: 1- to find out whether EFLLs are able to know which words in a sentence are given more prominence by speakers. 2- To investigate whether listening to audio materials (record speech) has effectiveness on placement of sentence stress. 3- To enhance EFLLs ability to place and produce sentence stress correctly. 4- To draw EFLLs attention to the role of sentence stress on pronunciation enhancement. It applies a quasi-experimental design as the major method of the study and it has certain sample, third year students, which are chosen from the students who are formally registered for the academic year 2019- 2020 at Faculty of Arts department of English language and literature in Omdurman Islamic University. Since the study adopts a quasi- experimental design Test. Teach. Test (T.T.T) is assigned to collect data from subjects. So, they are given a pre-test and then, according to observations taken by researcher handouts, worksheets and audio materials are given to the subjects to train them how to place word stress within a sentence correctly finally they are given post- test. They are asked to mark stressed words within a sentence. The paper outlines the following findings: a- Listening to audio materials by native speaker has positive effect on placement of sentence stress and intelligibility. b- Classroom interventions such as listening to audio materials and handout that were given to the subjects during prescribed course have positive impact on subjects’ intelligibility. c- The subjects expressed increased confidence in speaking due to intelligibility which they gained. So, the amount of time subjects spent listening to and practicing along with the audio materials are also a good indication that they are headed in the right direction of improving their pronunciation as well as intelligibility. For further studies, the researcher suggests two topics to be carried out in the future. (1) The effectiveness of intonation and assimilation in intelligibility. (2) The effectiveness of supra segmental features in pronunciation.