TEACHING WORD STRESS AND INTONATION TO EFL LEARNERS

This paper offers EFL teachers some practical guidelines that may help them ease the teaching of word stress and intonation. The study shows that word stress and intonation are very significant for oral communication. It also justifies the choice of using RP rather than GA when teaching pronunciation to EFL learners in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some prerequisites to the teaching of pronunciation are similarly provided before suggesting how teachers may handle to teach word stress and intonation to EFL learners. As for the teaching of word stress, the teacher should select words of which the stress placement cause problems, put them in a sentence, utter the sentence and make them repeat by the learners first in chorus and then individually. Afterwards, the teacher pronounces the word in isolation at least three times and ask the learners to repeat it first in chorus and then individually. He will then present other words of the same family and induce the rule if necessary. Concerning the teaching of intonation, the use of chorus and individual pronunciation, gestures, and the blackboard will help the teacher indicate the different types of intonation.