Correcting English learner’s suprasegmental errors

Abstract

The main cause of pronunciation problems faced by EFL learners is their lack of a suprasegmental background. Most of those having oral comprehension and expression difficulties are unaware that their difficulty comes from their negligence of concepts of stress, pitch, juncture and linkers. While remedying stress problems, students should be taught the general rules, emphasising on primary and secondary stress, using various forms of pitch to give emotions to their utterances, taking shorter and longer pauses between meaningful thought chunks through junctures, and solidifying such suprasegmentals through constant exercises in dialogues as seen in model videos. Native speakers react more violently to unacceptable suprasegmental errors than segmental ones; thus, neglect of such important pronunciation elements risk harming the quality of communication. Learners of English should consider the good old cliche, It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it, if they want to have effective communication with their audience.

Keywords: Stress placement, primary, secondary stress, prominence, compound/phrasal stress, pitch, juncture, fossilised error, algorith of suffixes