Understanding and Teaching the Pronunciation of English.pdf

Also, when learning new vocabulary, it’s very important for
students to learn stress patterns along with the pronunciation
and meaning of the new words. As they say the words many
times through repetition and other practice activities, word
stress and syllable patterns will start to feel natural and
become a part of the student’s permanent knowledge about
the words.

The next sections describe some of the simpler guidelines
about word stress that are easy to understand and teach.

Nouns and verbs: A general guideline

There’s no rule that works 100% of the time in predicting
where the stress will be in words in English. However, there
is a somewhat reliable generalization about word stress in
nouns and verbs that have two syllables.

According to Avery and Ehrlich (1992), two-syllable nouns
are stressed on the !rst syllable more than 90% of the time,
while two-syllable verbs are stressed on the second syllable
more than 60% of the time. In other words, two-syllable
nouns are much more likely to have a stress pattern like this:

, while two-syllable verbs are more likely to have a

stress pattern like this:. The following table lists some
words that follow this pattern:

Two-Syllable Nouns: Oo Two-Syllable Verbs: oO

woman pencil window

table color apple

paper people mother

receive become improve

appear begin express

describe compare believe

Noun-verb pairs with different stress

In keeping with the general rule we’ve just learned, there are

some word pairs consisting of a noun and a verb that are

spelled the same way, but the noun is stressed on the !rst

syllable and the verb is stressed on the second syllable. For

example, ˈpermit is a noun, but perˈmit is a verb:

• You need a ˈpermit to park here.


• Please perˈmit me to help you.
  Sometimes a change in vowel sounds goes along with this
  change in word stress because the unstressed vowels are
  reduced to /ə/. For example, the !rst syllable in contrast is
  pronounced as /ɑ/ when it’s a noun (and that syllable is
  stressed) but it’s pronounced /ə/ when it’s a verb (and that
  syllable is unstressed.)

Box 8.3 shows a list of some of the most common noun-verb

pairs with di"erent stress patterns.

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