Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies

6. Grammar School Survey Analysis

Since correct stress placement is such a fundamental feature of language, intertwined with most of the basic abilities necessary for a speaker to be understood, and since the main purpose of second language acquisition is to teach the student the ability to communicate in the given language, it should come as self-evident that teaching English stress system to second language students should be one of the main goals. Yet when browsing through frequently used English textbooks such as Headway, Opportunities, Project or Destination, exercises dedicated exclusively to English stress placement are sporadic at best, in fact often missing completely from even the more advanced level books. In the occasional exercises or vocabulary lists with phonetic transcriptions of words, stress marks are generally missing. In other words, the issue of stress is mostly or completely ignored in favour of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, with the hope that stressing habits will be acquired through listening to the teacher’s speech as well as to recordings provided with the textbooks to the teacher.
The question arising is then, whether the Czech system of second language acquisition indeed teaches students how to correctly deal with English stress placement. In order to answer this question, a survey was undertaken on one of the major grammar schools in Brno. The students were presented with two recordings (Appendix 2) of the following text:

How I lost my job

My boss invited me to a company skiing trip to the Alps last month. I really dislike him so I didn’t want to go, but one of my older colleagues warned me that the boss doesn’t like it when people refuse his invitations. In fact, he said, most people who decline his invitation get fired within a year. I took his advice and accepted the offer. After all, I thought, a little exercise won’t do me any harm. Also I didn’t want such a silly thing to ruin my career. Unfortunately, my decision didn’t have the desired effect.
On our way to the chalet, we stopped in a hotel for the night. As it happened, there was a wild party going on and all the guests were invited to join. From what I’ve been told, I drank three bottles of wine in record time during the event and got into a horrific argument with the boss. By the end of it, I punched him in the face and ran away. Needless to say, I was fired before I even saw the first sign of snow.

The first of the recordings contained a total of ten errors in stress placement: `invited (twice), co`lleagues, `refuse (pronounced ɾefju:s), `advice, `career, `hotel, re`cord (pronounced ɾɪkɑ:d), `event and `horrific, while the other recording used correct stress. The students were presented with a questionnaire (Appendix 1) containing the full text and a single question: the students’ task was to recognize which one of the recordings used correct stress. A total of 137 students were presented with the questionnaire, ranging from the first year to fourth year of secondary education. The results were as follows (Table 1):

Table 1
Survey Results
Class	Correct answers	Incorrect answers	Total students	Success rate
1.D	16	9	25	64%
1.C	6	3	9	66.66%
3.C (group 1)^1	10	6	16	62.5%
3.B	7	5	12	58.33%
2.B	17	9	26	65.38%
4.C	14	9	23	60.86%
3.A	10	2	12	83,33%
3.C (group 2)	8	6	14	57.14%
Total	88	49	137	64.23%

Most of the classes made use of the opportunity to listen to both recordings again before filling in their answers. Also, most of the classes first had to be told what the phrase “English stress” means, indicating that they have never heard it mentioned in class before, or infrequently enough not to remember. With the exception of class 3.A which overall scored particularly well, classes did not know the correct translation of the term after it was explained to them (most either did not know the translation at all or translated the term as “přízvuk”, while a much better and accurate translation is “důraz”). Looking at the results we will notice several trends among the classes:

1. 
   With the exception of 3.A only one class scored over 65%, that being the first year class 1.D. Considering the fact that the questionnaire contained only two questions, there was a 50% chance that students choose the correct answer simply by guessing. The total average of the classes surveyed was 64.23%. In theory, if from the 137 students ca 19 could tell the correct answer from the recordings and the remaining 118 were merely guessing, the result would have been the same.
   
2. 
   There is no particular correspondence between the length of study and success rate. Indeed the first year classes scored slightly better than most of their older schoolmates. Regardless of how long the students have been studying English there seems to be no improvement in recognition of stress patterns. Even among the classes which scored relatively well when compared to the other classes, stress recognition seemed to be largely passive, as during the remainder of the lesson, a large number of quite common words such as technology have been pronounced with typically Czech stress (`technology) and have been left uncorrected by the teacher. The length of second language education with the current education system seems to have no effect on the student’s ability to recognize stress.
   
3. 
   In the case where the advanced and the less advanced groups of students were not examined together (3.C), the less advanced group scored better than the more advanced one. Though this has only been a singular occurrence, it would seem that regardless of whether a particular group of students was deemed inferior in terms of their English language skills or not, there was no correspondence between the success rate and the level of language skills. Though between different classes and different years of study the disparities in language skills could be accounted for simply by the language level at the time of arrival on the grammar school (a group of 1^st year students could have had better previous second language education than a group of 3^rd year students and are thus slightly more advanced in comparison), one of the groups from the same class was clearly marked as possessing worse language skills than the other, yet the results of the survey do not correspond with this assessment.
   
4. 
   The class of the oldest students (4.C) achieved the 3^rd worst score, even though they were told the correct stressing of the word hotel by their teacher before the recordings were played (the only class to be given such an advantage), and regardless of the fact that ten students, i.e. slightly less than half of the class, have been preparing for the English graduation exams for the majority of this school year. Thus it would appear that regardless of the special preparation the students have undergone during their studies for the graduation exams (which by the time the survey was done were only a few weeks away) had no effect on the success rate of the class. Moreover, even though the class was told beforehand which stressing of the word hotel was correct and had therefore only to identify the stressing within this one word in the recordings in order to recognize which one uses correct stress, the success rate of the class did not improve.
   

After the results have been evaluated, 3.A, which did above average when compared to other groups, was further interviewed on their experience with the English language and specifically stress. Though responses could not be obtained from all the students who participated in the survey, feedback was acquired from the majority. All of the students study English ten to eleven years and none of them was exposed to exercises dedicated to stress recognition in a larger scale during their studies; only one of them actually remembers doing an exercise focused on stress. There was, however, a number of factors which could have influenced the students’ performance: One of the students was born in the United States of America and is a native speaker of English. Two other students spent a week in the United Kingdom. While one of them claimed that the experience had no effect on his ability to speak English, the other emphasized the fact that it was the first time he ever had to communicate with native speakers and felt that the opportunity benefited his English language skills. One other student attends Spanish courses. She especially highlighted the fact that in Spanish, word stress is clearly indicated in the written word as well (e.g. the spelling of español indicates that the syllable containing the ñ is stressed; similarly the spelling of the name José symbolizes that the second syllable of the word bears the main stress) which helps her recognize stress better in languages. Another student has attended English classes outside of school for the entirety of his English studies, i.e. for ca ten years. The classes were focused not only on grammar, but also on communication; nevertheless, he does not feel that the lessons greatly impacted his ability to recognize stress. However, almost universally, the students mentioned the fact that they watch sitcoms in English regularly in their free time and are thus regularly exposed to native speaker English for extended periods of time. Also, as is the trend with films and other types of series as well, the goal of the sitcom is to convey emotion and humour and thus pronunciation and word and sentence stress are oftentimes exaggerated to better express and emphasize the character’s emotions.
It would consequently appear, if the overall results were to be generalized and expanded, that the Czech system of secondary education is wholly insufficient in regards to stress recognition in spoken text alone. Naturally, it can be presumed that the resulting ability of students to produce correct stress will by similarly, if not more impacted. Yet more substantial is the fact that the basic supposition on which the education system is founded, that being that students will acquire stress placement habits through exposure to spoken text (Hill, 1965, p. vi), is fundamentally flawed due to the fact that, as the survey proves, a large portion of the students is in fact unable to correctly recognize stress in a spoken text even when presented with the most common examples such as hotel or record. On the other hand, students which regularly and voluntarily expose themselves to the English language or another strongly stressed language for extended periods of time outside of school seem to acquire the ability to recognize stress better than their schoolmates. While this data was acquired from only a small portion of the students surveyed, and thus might not be universally applicable, it would appear that while in-class exposure to the spoken word is wholly insufficient, it is possible for the students to acquire correct stress placement habits simply by listening to the English language, if done at a large enough scale, just as a native English speaker acquires stress placement habits from childhood simply by constant exposure to the English language used around them without being taught the rules of English stressing.
It is therefore necessary, in order to correctly teach English stress placement and consequently improve the students’ ability to produce speech easily intelligible to a native speaker, to try to teach stress by practice and to incorporate stress teaching into the very basis of the second language acquisition system from the very beginning, since, as is apparent from the survey, advanced study of the language does not provide the learner with the ability to recognize correct stress placement independently unless specifically tutored to do so. Since English stress placement is marked by such complexity, it is necessary to introduce simplification into the system (Hill, 1965, p. vi) for easier teachability, and preferably employ stress exercises throughout the entirety of second language education, i.e. from the earliest stages, through practical exercises such as clapping or drumming (Tibbitts, 1967, p. 9) in order for the students to acquire the rhythm of the language physically.
Alternatively, or preferably in addition to the abovementioned improvements in teaching, students’ exposure to the English language should be greatly expanded in the form of film or series presentations or homework, in order for the students to listen to the English spoken word from native speakers for longer periods of time. Doing so in an entertaining form, such as popular films or series, would greatly influence the students’ interest in understanding the spoken word as much as possible, and thus the acquisition of stress placement within the English language would become much more intuitive.
Also, workbooks, textbooks and vocabulary books should include stress patterns of new words, or exercises where students mark the stress themselves. Overall, stress teaching should become one of the main goals of second language acquisition and should be incorporated into lessons regularly, since “little and often is better than a lot at rare intervals” (Hill, 1965, p. vii). Textbooks with only sporadic stress exercises or worse yet textbooks with no exercises of such kind should be abandoned in favour of books making frequent use of such exercises or even dedicated textbooks focused on stress placement or overall phonetics alone. Both Tibbitts, Hill as well as authors not cited in this thesis have produced textbooks of this kind yet are being ignored by second language teaching on secondary schools where they could be of most use, since the basic knowledge of the language has already been acquired at that point, and refinements and corrections to one’s understandability can thus be successfully made. Moreover, the ability to correctly place stress based on the properties of a word will then greatly improve the students’ ability to correctly pronounce new and previously unknown words.