Game-based Teaching of Stress Placement on Multi-syllabic English Words

Accurate pronunciation is an important component of language ability and the main outward linguistic sign of whether someone is a native speaker of a language or not. An area of particular difficulty for Persian-speaking learners of English, which may cause 'foreign accent' or misunderstanding in speaking, is placement of stress on multi-syllable words. Game-based pronunciation teaching can be a pedagogical option to tackle that problematic feature of English pronunciation as it incorporates both implicit and explicit approaches to instruction. This study, therefore, investigates the effects of using a pronunciation game on learning stress placement on multi-syllable English words by young Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Fifty-two intermediate EFL learners were randomly selected through administration of Preliminary English Test (PET) and divided into two groups: the experimental group (group A) containing 27 students and the control group (Group B) containing 25 students. The experimental group received game-based instruction and materials for eight class sessions. Two weeks after the final class, a post-test was conducted to find out the changes. The results showed a significant difference between the performance of experimental and control groups on the post-test. The experimental group outperformed the control group and indicated quite positive attitudes towards the use of the game-based learning of pronunciation. The researchers recommend using such games to EFL teachers in order to motivate and help their students learn pronunciation more effectively.