Knowledge on English Disyllabic Word Stress Patterns in Dutch High School Students from VWO-2nd Grade and VWO-5th Grade

Abstract

This master thesis reports an experimental second language acquisition study concerning stress at word level and in particular the word stress in disyllabic nouns and verbs in English. Through a production task and a perception task it investigates the nature of the implicit knowledge on the main stress patterns in English that Dutch high school students possess. Moreover, the two groups of students that participated were of different ages and levels, so not only the nature of their implicit knowledge was researched, but also whether it differed over time. The results of the production task indicate that neither the VWO-2nd grade students nor the VWO-5th grade students seem to have sufficient knowledge on the stress patterns of disyllabic nouns and verbs in English. It is therefore recommended that schools and teachers incorporate exercises on word stress in the existing curriculum, and that schools offer opportunities to teacher to expand their knowledge and develop their teacher skills with respect to word stress. Additionally, future research on the learning of second language stress patterns should focus on developing the most effective methods for teaching second language stress patterns and how to assess the students’ performances to help teachers in this process.