Implicit versus Explicit Teaching of Stress Rules of English Affixes to Iranian EFL Learners

Teaching and learning stress rules of every language has always been of great interest of L۲ instructors. The present study was an attempt to explore effects of two implicit and explicit procedures on learning stress rules of English prefixes and suffixes. Further, it sought to measure the difficultness of prefixes and suffixes in terms of being learnt by Iranian university students. The participants were ۳۲ Iranian male and female freshman BA students studying English Translation in Shahrekord University. They were divided into, implicit and explicit groups. A list of ۲۰ words, including both neutral and non –neutral prefixes and suffixes was designed. This test was used as both pretest and posttest for the evaluation of stress patterns knowledge. The implicit group learned the stress rules of affixes by only examples while the explicit group was provided with explicit teaching of stress rules. Performances on the posttests were compared by ANOCVA and paired sample t-test. Findings indicated that the explicit group outperformed the implicit group. Moreover, it was shown students acquired stress rules of English prefixes more easily than they acquired those of suffixes. Findings can benefit instructors of phonetics and phonology courses in presenting English phonetics rules better. These findings are more useful for Iranian educational contexts since Iranian EFL learners have many problems in English pronunciation due to differences between both languages. Moreover, findings of explicit and implicit methods of teaching can be used by L۲ teachers who teach pronunciation courses

کلیدواژه ها:

Implicit Teaching ، Explicit Teaching ، Suprasegmental Features ، English Stress Patterns ، Word Stress ، Prefix ، Suffix