Auditory Recognition of Primary Stress Phoneme in Four Sentence Types by Turkish English Majors

Research Article

Abstract

The audition and identification of stress phonemes in four types of sentences is a crucial problem for the first year students of English majors in Turkey. The primary stress is a phonemic incident in English and its auditory recognition is a problem for many Turkish students because it plays an important role in spoken English. The detection of primary stress is also helpful in determining the pronunciation and intonation proficiency of the language learners. The perception of the placement primary stress and hearing it altogether in four types of sentences one after another as a collective group is a valuable testing ground for the measurement of the placement of the primary stress perception in four types of sentences in English. In this research, 53 first year English majors in one of the foundation universities in Ankara listened to 5 selected sentences from simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentence types.  The participants heard the each sentence three times in five seconds intervals and marked the correct answer in a multiple choice test item. So, they saw each sentence on paper and after listening to it, they marked the correct answer on the answer sheet. The pretest of 20 questions is administrated to the participants, and after a sentence stress teaching period of 8 hours, the same questionnaire is re-administrated in the same manner of its first application. The results are submitted to SPSS 20 and results are calculated, which revealed that the percentage of the correct audition of the sentence types was %74 out of 100.