Awareness, Perception, and Production of English Lexical Stress by Korean Learners of English

This study aimed to investigate the awareness, perception, and production of English lexical stress by Korean learners of English and to assess the effectiveness of targeted pronunciation practice. Participants divided into English majors and non-majors were asked to complete tasks assessing awareness, perception, and production of stress patterns prior to any intervention, followed by two post-intervention production tasks. Findings from the three pre-intervention tasks indicate that they made the fewest errors in the perception task, often correctly identifying stress placement in perception while making errors in other tasks. The post-intervention production tasks demonstrated improved performance in stress production, validating learning effect. It is interesting to note that explicit instruction on stress placement provided before the third production task resulted in a high error correction rate of 87%. Correlation analysis indicated that stress errors generally increased with word length, independent of word frequency.