When we think of teaching 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 way 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, we can focus on the ones 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 AmE and "laBORatory" in BrE) 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, recorded by an English teacher:

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 these mistakes. 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, a non-native speaker of English once pronounced the word “circled” as “cirCLED,” leading his non-native speaker to hear 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 (po-TA-to), pitch (po-TA-to), and length (po-TAAAYYY-to).

Length is the aspect of stress that has the biggest impact on whether a listener will understand you, so 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, for instance: “po TAAAAAA to,” “po TA’’’’’’’’’ to” or “po TA-------- to”.

Hand gestures are also very helpful to signaling syllable length. For example, you can bring your hands together on the short syllables and hold your hands 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, focus on vowel length and understanding (instead of 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 piece to understand why Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese students have such difficulty with word stress.

Happy tutoring!