The effect of phonetic transcription on Iranian EFL students' word stress learning

The correct location of lexical stress is a main concern for English as a foreign language (EFL) learners whose first language has a different stress system. Therefore, in light of the fact that pronunciation errors in English are often the result of the Farsi language sound system transfer, the present study examined the impact of phonetic transcription on Iranian undergraduate EFL students' word stress learning. The quasi-experimental design was used to study two classes of EFL major students at the University of Bojnord (UB) and Kosar University of Bojnord (KUB) as the experimental group (EG) and control group (CG) respectively. A 60-item word stress test was developed by the researcher based on 20 lessons of The Flatmates from the BBC's learning English website to examine the learners' achievements. The test reliability was determined to be 0.71 through KR-21 formula. The independent samples t-test results indicated that the EG outperformed the CG. Thus, the findings suggest that EFL learners' phonetic transcription can facilitate the process of lexical stress learning.