THE PROBLEM STRESS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING

A native speaker knows which part of a word is the most important. For example, in the word ‘photograph’ not all the parts are of equal importance.we can divide the word into three parts : ‘pho’, ‘to’, and ‘graph’.  The native speaker of English will say the word in the following way, ‘PHOtograph’, making the first part, or syllable, more important and stronger than the other two parts. The situation changes with the word ‘ photographer’, however, and we get ‘phoTOgrapher’ with the stress falling on the second syllable. More examples will show the importance of word stress: the word ‘perMIT’ is a verb, but the word ‘PERmit’ is a noun! The same is true of the words, ‘imPORT and ‘Import’.

Stress is also very important in sentences. For example if I say ‘I can RUN’ Iam probably only telling you about my ability to run. But if I say ‘I CAN run’ I am probably stressing the word can because someone has suggested that I am not able to run and I am vehemently denying it. If somebody said to you ‘ is this your PENcil’?’ it would probably be a simple question with no deep meaning, but if the same person said ‘ Is this YOUR pencil ?’ he might be showing, by stressing the word ‘your’ that there was something very surprising about your possession of the pencil.

The native speaker unconsciously knows about stress and how it works. He knows which parts of individual words should be stressed and he knows how to put special meaning into sentences by making different words more or less important.