Presentation

What can reading aloud tell us about word stress difficulties?

Authors: John M Levis (Iowa State University) , Tarik Uzun (Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University)

Abstract

This study investigated the effectiveness of a read-aloud task in assessing word stress accuracy among Turkish learners of English at different proficiency levels. Forty undergraduate students from two universities in Ankara, Türkiye, participated in the study, comprising higher-proficiency English language teaching majors and lower-proficiency students from various academic majors. Their recordings, obtained through a read-aloud task, were analyzed by expert listeners to identify recurring patterns and potential sources of word stress errors. Results indicated that higher-proficiency students made fewer word stress errors, while lower-proficiency students showed more frequent and varied errors. The findings indicated that stress errors were partly attributable to differences in orthographic depth and cross-linguistic transfer from Turkish. Learners tended to disregard phonological processes such as vowel reduction, producing English words with Turkish-like sound–spelling correspondences. Additionally, borrowed words were frequently pronounced according to their established Turkish forms, suggesting direct transfer from L1 phonological representations.

Keywords: word stress, lexical stress, L2 proficiency, orthography, borrowings, reading aloud

How to Cite: Levis, J. M. & Uzun, T. (2026) “What can reading aloud tell us about word stress difficulties?”, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Proceedings. 16(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/psllt.21224