Word Stress and Pronunciation Teaching in English as a Lingua Franca Contexts

Abstract

Traditionally, pronunciation was taught by reference to nativespeaker models. However, as speakers around the world increasingly interact in English as a lingua franca (ELF) contexts, there is less focus on native-speaker targets, and there is wide acceptance that achieving intelligibility is crucial while mimicking nativespeaker pronunciation is not important. However, if there is no clear model to refer to, how do we give guidance to students about how to improve their pronunciation, and how do we determine what needs to be fixed in order to enhance intelligibility? This article considers teaching pronunciation in ELF contexts, making reference to a corpus of interactions recorded in Brunei involving 41 speakers from various countries in Southeast Asia, particularly focusing on stress patterns, to see what impact variant stress has on intelligibility. It is found that there is some evidence that word stress may contribute to misunderstandings occurring in ELF interactions.