Teaching Word Stress? Focus on These Two Principles

When teaching our students about word stress, it’s easy to think about all the rules and feel overwhelmed. Luckily, there are actually far more important aspects of word stress we should focus on — and they’re much more intuitive!

#1 Focus on Understanding, Not Correctness

First, it’s important to prioritize understanding over correctness. In other words, rather than correcting every single mistake our students make, we can focus on the mistakes that lead to misunderstandings.

In general, the longer a word is, the less likely it will be misunderstood. For example, if a student says a four-syllable word incorrectly (e.g. “aspaRAgus” instead of “asPAragus” or “PHOtographer” instead of “phoTOgrapher”), they usually won’t be misunderstood.

In fact, native speakers also couldn't make up their minds when it came to certain longer words, like “laboratory” ("LAboratory" in American English and "laBORatory" in British English) and “advertisement" ("ADvertisement" in AmE and "adVERtisement" in BrE).

That said, there are times when misplacement of stress causes problems. For example, take a look at the following situation:

In this conversation, the student pronounced “committee” with a stress on the first syllable (CO-mmit-tee), which led the teacher to hear “comedy.”

We definitely want to point out mistakes like these. However, instead of simply saying “It’s coMITtee, not COMmitee,” we’ll want to explain why the mistake matters:

By providing a reason, students will have an easier time remembering the pronunciation and also know why it’s important to pronounce the word correctly.

How serious a mistake is also depends on whether the learner shifts the stress forward or backward. An example of the forward (or leftward) shift is pronouncing “enJOY” like “ENjoy.” This usually doesn’t cause problems.

However, shifting the stress backward (or rightward) tends to cause problems, because it makes the listener think that the speaker is starting a new word. For example, if someone pronounces the word “circled” as “cirCLED,” it might lead to listener to hearing the word "called" instead.

#2 Focus on Length

There is one aspect of stress that we want to focus on: vowel length. As you may know, stress is a combination of loudness and pitch (po-TA-to) along with length (po-TAAAYYY-to).

Since length has a major impact on whether the speaker will be understood, we’ll want to help our students learn to lengthen stressed syllables and shorten unstressed syllables.

A visual cue you can use is to type syllables with spaces or other symbols between them to indicate length (“po TAAAAAA to” or “po TA-------- to”).

Hand gestures are also very helpful for signaling syllable length. For example, you can bring your hands together on the short syllables and hold them apart for the long syllables, like this:

Many teachers find it useful to use the rubber band technique, in which learners stretch a rubber band during the stressed syllable.

Encourage your students to make these gestures as well so they “get a feel” for stress. If you teach kids, you can even have them stand up or raise their hands during stressed syllables.

📌 Takeaways

To sum up, when teaching word stress, focus on vowel length and understanding rather than correctness. Stress mistakes that occur in shorter words or involve rightward shifting (COffee → coFFEE) cause more problems. These are the aspects of stress that will make the biggest difference in the student’s pronunciation.

Finally, don’t forget to read this post to understand why Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese students have such difficulty with English word stress.

Happy tutoring!