The effect of phonetic transcription on Iranian EFL students' word stress learning

Abstract

The correct location of lexical stress is a main concern for EFL learners whose first language has a different stress system. Therefore, in light of the fact that English pronunciation errors are often caused by the transfer of the Persian language sound system, the present study investigated the effect of phonetic transcription on Iranian undergraduate EFL students’ word stress learning. Since random assignment was not possible, the nonequivalent group, pretest-posttest design was employed to study two classes of EFL major students at the University of Bojnord (UB) and Kosar University of Bojnord (KUB) as the experimental group (EG) and control group (CG) respectively. Both groups were exposed to the same activities; however, only the EG received the treatment regarding the phonemic transcription. A 60-item word stress test was developed by the researcher based on a collection of 20 episodes of The Flatmates from the BBC's learning English website to measure students’ achievements. The reliability of the test was estimated 0.71 through KR-21 formula. The results of the independent samples t-test from the posttest indicated that the EG had a better performance than the CG. Thus, the findings suggest that EFL learners’ phonemic transcription can facilitate the process of lexical stress learning.