A Study of the Factors Affecting Chinese Senior High School EFL Students’ Stress Performances on Derived Words

• Main Authors: Chia-ching Huang, 黃佳靖
• Other Authors: Feng-lan Kuo
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/32169629217312440807

碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 英語學系 === 98 === Vocabulary specialists have constantly argued for the importance of learning the most common stress patterns to acquire accurate word reading in derived words (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 1996; Murphy & Kandil, 2004), yet remarkable little is known about the factors that make a language learner’s stress production inaccurate. Therefore, this study focuses on examining the factors of suffix types (Jarmulowicz & Hay, 2009), lexical categories (S. Lee, 2006) and lexical familiarity (Hubbard & Prins, 1994) on two intact classes of Chinese senior high school EFL students’ stress production in derived words. Moreover, the relationship between the subjects’ stress production and their stress knowledge was investigated the stress production task and the stress knowledge task. General linear model results showed that suffix types and lexical familiarity are the two predictors of the subjects’ stress production and stress knowledge. Though there is a close relationship between the subjects’ stress production and their stress knowledge in derived words, the subjects were found to perform significantly better in stress production. To conclude, this study is of importance in finding out the close relationship among suffix types, lexical familiarity, and stress production accuracy, as well as the significant relationship between the subjects’ performances on stress production and stress knowledge. Pedagogical implications based on the research findings will be of interest to both Chinese EFL teachers and learners.