The effects of explicit rule and acoustic-perceptual instructions on Chinese ESL learners’ prosodic acquisition of English lexical stress

Word stress has become one of the elements that English learners pay attention to because of its complexity and unpredictability. The main purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of two word stress instruction approaches, explicit rule instruction and acoustic-perceptual instruction. The study consists of five parts: pre-test, training, immediate post-test, introspective protocols, and delayed post-test. Forty Chinese learners of English were recruited and invited to read and listen 62 disyllabic and multisyllabic words in three tests. The participants were divided into two groups. However, 7 participants dropped out, and there are 33 participants (18 in the explicit rule instruction group and 15 in the acoustic-perceptual instruction group) in the current study. Normal stress rules were involved while the basics of Praat and the graphical representations were instructed to visualize the lexical stress. Overall, the participants’ English word stress perception and production improved in both groups. Participants who received explicit rule instruction made significant improvements in the two post-tests. The improvement of the learners who received the acoustic-perceptual approach in the immediate post-test is not significant but is significant in the delayed post-test. The acoustic-perceptual approach takes time to produce a marked effect on word stress learning. Copyright © 2020 International Speech Communications Association. All rights reserved.