Arabs’ stress placement in English: Intelligibility test

This study was intended to give an impressionistic description of Arabs’ performance in English stress placement. Therefore, two native British English speakers were asked to evaluate six Arabs production of English words. Findings indicated that Arab subjects’ ‘‘conscious knowledge’’ of a stressful speaking situation was less than satisfactory. Listeners reported a great percentage of confusion in stress placement. A number of explanations were attempted for the intelligibility problem which arises from the misplacement of stress in our subjects’ production. It was inferred from confusions Arabs made that suprasegmentals are to be given emphasis in the teaching of foreign languages and should be taught simultaneously with segmental structure of the target tongue. [Research supported by Yarmouk University.]