Word-level stress patterns in the academic wordlist

John Murphy*, Magdi Kandil

Department of Applied Linguistics and English as a Second Language, PO Box 4099,

Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30302-3082, USA

Received 12 March 2003; received in revised form 24 June 2003; accepted 29 June 2003

Abstract

This paper addresses teachers and researchers of English as a second or foreign languagewho are interested in speech intelligibility training and/or vocabulary acquisition. The studyreports a stress-pattern analysis of the Academic Word List (AWL) as made available byCoxhead [TESOL Quarterly 34 (2000) 213]. To examine the AWL in a new way, we identified

patterns of word-level stress in the AWL’s 525 headwords and 2454 sublist items, or 2979polysyllabic academic words in all. The report’s final table rank orders 39 patterns of word-level stress. We learned that the first 14 patterns encompass over 90% of the AWL’s lexical

items, while the remaining 25 patterns are low in frequency of occurrence. Results of ouranalysis may be coupled with information on word-level stress already available in the litera-ture (e.g., systematic shifts in word-level stress—as well as corresponding changes in vowel

quality—due to such phenomena as suffixation, derivational morphology, and other aspectsof rule-based pedagogy). The paper’s concluding section highlights the importance of intro-ducing English for Academic Purposes (EAP) learners to such pattern phenomena in coordi-

nation with the word stress frequency data reported in the study.# 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Word-level stress patterns; Academic word list; Vocabulary; Pronunciation

Being easily understood when we speak is important to all second languagelearners. Speech intelligibility, however, may be especially important and challengingfor nonnative English speaking (NNES) teachers, scholars, graduate students, and

System 32 (2004) 61–74

www.elsevier.com/locate/system

0346-251X/$ - see front matter # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.system.2003.06.001

* Corresponding author. Present address: 3621 Castaway Court, Atlanta, GA 30341, USA. Tel.: +1-

770-270-9028; fax: +1-404-651-3652.

E-mail addresses: jmmurphy@gsu.edu (J. Murphy), magdykan@yahoo.com (M. Kandil).

undergraduate students as they learn to use the vocabulary required for academiccommunication. While longer stretches of speech and related dimensions of phon-ology have been emphasized in recent studies (Pickering, 2001; Wennerstrom, 1998),NNES scholars and students also need to be knowledgeable about word-levelpronunciation both of general academic vocabulary and of the technical wordscharacteristic of specialized fields of study. Speech-intelligibility is of particularconcern to such English language learners. Though accepted instructional practicein recent years has been to focus on longer stretches of discourse (Levis, 1999;Morley, 1994), we worked at the word-level for purposes of this report in responseto a number of specialists who suggest that gaining requisite control of word-stresspatterns is an integral part of the experience of learning—and of learning to use—anew word. In the next section, we briefly review five areas of the literature thatsupport our interest in patterns of word-level stress for purposes of English languageteaching and learning. These areas suggest connections between more confident useof word-level stress for spoken communication and: (1) expanding one’s activevocabulary, (2) fine-tuning use of broader phonological features, (3) synchronizingphysical correlates of body language, (4) enhancing vowel quality usage, and (5)learning to use orthographic clues to predict the pronunciation of less familiarwords.

1. Literature review

The phenomenon of word-level stress is one of the more prominent topics featuredin English as a second language (ESL) speech-intelligibility training (Celce-Murciaet al., 1996). Since polysyllabic words permeate the English lexical system, ESLlearners need to be familiar with—and to be able to work with—word-level stress iftheir speech is to be comprehensible to proficient English speakers (Murphy, inpress). Patterns of word-level stress provide essential signals to English languagelisteners as they attempt to make sense of incoming messages (Aitchison, 1994;Cutler et al., 1997). Nation’s (2001) definition of what it means for ESL learners toknow a word includes three facets: The word’s form (spoken, written, and wordparts), meaning, and use. All three facets are essential to developing and expandingone’s vocabulary knowledge. An essential dimension of knowing a word’s spokenform is learning to use its pattern of word-level stress. Adding further support toNation’s position, contemporary psycholinguists agree that one of the ways in whichlanguage users store words in the mind is connected with stress patterning (Levelt,1993). Both Aitchison’s (1994) model of vocabulary knowledge and Levelt’s (1993)model of speaking competence propose that learners who are able to recognize anduse accurately the stress pattern of a new word are more likely to remember and usethe word in extemporaneous speech.

An advantage for ESL speakers with adequate control of word-level stress is thatsimilar phenomena are paralleled at phrase, sentence, and even broader discourselevels. Familiarity with the phenomena of word-stress provides an essential basis forunderstanding how stress functions at broader levels since patterns of ‘‘word and

62 J. Murphy, M. Kandil / System 32 (2004) 61–74

sentence stress combine to create the rhythm of an English utterance’’ (Celce-Murciaet al., 1996, p. 152). To function as intelligible speakers in English, ESL learnersneed adequate control over such phonological features. Along with intonation,English language listeners depend upon stress and rhythm patterns as navigationalguides to support effective listening (Gilbert, 1994). Acton (2001) proposes addi-tional functions of stress in spoken English by pointing out that physical correlatesof body language are closely tied to word-, phrase-, and sentence-level stress phe-nomena. As discussed below, Acton is not alone in highlighting connections betweenbody language and rhythmic dimensions of spoken communication.

Proficient English speakers link body gestures to rhythmic features of their speech.That is, English speakers use much more than what we conventionally think of asthe organs of speech (e.g., tongue, mouth, vocal cords) when communicating withothers (McNeill, 1992). Rather, we use our whole bodies including hand movements,head nods, shifts in body positionings, eye contact, the tapping of fingers, toes, feet,and so forth. Wylie (1978) comments as follows:

Communication [in English] is really a dance of the whole body and the soundswe produce [while speaking] are simply the music that accompanies the rest ofthe communication . . . when I talk with my voice the noises I am making fit inwith the motions I am giving my hands, fit in with the steps I take with my feet.My whole body is in synchrony’’ (pp. 51, 57).

Through frame-by-frame analysis of film recordings of naturally occurring con-versations, Byers (1976) illustrates that interpersonal communication in Englishincludes a process of attaining, or trying to attain, synchrony with others via physi-cal correlates of body language. Thus, attention to word-level stress may serve as astarting point for developing ESL learner awareness of speech–body connectionsthat eventually may be expanded to include attention to phrase, sentence, and dis-course levels.

Acton (2001) describes ESL pedagogy informed by this perspective. At initialstages in the classroom, the teacher familiarizes learners with a video sample ofrecorded English speech. Along with watching the video, a written transcript isprovided. For example, learners might watch a 10 min segment of a popular Englishlanguage talk show (e.g., Oprah, Larry King, or Dr. Phil). After viewing the videoseveral times, students begin to analyze the written version. Their analysis includesparsing the transcript ‘‘. . . into rhythm groups at constituent boundaries. The majorconstituents are then tied into, or associated with, the upper-body rhythms andfacial expressions . . .’’ (Acton, 1984, p. 79). At culminating stages, students areasked to speak along with the show’s participants [i.e., simultaneously] while usingspeech synchronized gestures. ‘‘. . . Students begin to move their bodies in accor-dance with the rhythm groups [as depicted in the recording]. The specific non-verbalmovements focused on include . . . gestures that may accompany certain intonationcontours (e.g., head motions, body and hand movements) . . .’’ (p. 79). Minimally,students learn to move their upper bodies in ‘‘a gentle, unobtrusive rocking motion,coordinating that movement with sentence stress and contrastive stress’’ (p. 79).

J. Murphy, M. Kandil / System 32 (2004) 61–74 63

Speech intelligibility practice of this kind is intriguing since it integrates attention torhythms of word, phrase, and broader discourse samples with illustrations of bodylanguage modeled by native English speakers.

Along with ties to physical gestures, there are important connections between theoperation of word-level stress and other phonological features of English such asvowel quality, pitch, rhythm, and intonation. Table 1 illustrates that at word-level,stress locations and tonic accents tend to be realized as full vowels while the qualityof unstressed vowels tends to reduce to an indistinct ‘‘schwa’’ sound. Also, Dick-erson (1994) advances the idea that knowledge of stress patterns of polysyllabicwords not only assists ESL learners in becoming more confident spellers in Englishbut may contribute to empowering them to predict target pronunciations from theorthographic forms of unfamiliar words (p. 17). Further, familiarity with word-levelstress may be exploited in ESL classrooms by making connections to information onderivational morphology and parts of speech (e.g., verb vs. adjective forms of wordssuch as appropriate, graduate, moderate). These proposals suggest that along withattention to longer stretches of speech and related dimensions of English languagephonology, attention to word-level stress plays an essential role when it comes to theteaching of speech-intelligibility.

2. Why focus on the AWL?

ESL students can be overwhelmed, at times, by the many features of the Englishsound system they face as second language learners. To provide information thatteachers can use to address this issue, we decided to identify patterns of word-levelstress, and their frequency of occurrence, in the Academic Word List (AWL) asprovided by Coxhead (2000). In wide use at the present time, the AWL is the firstlisting of academic words that was developed through techniques of principled cor-pus analysis. Coxhead generated the AWL by examining electronic texts with thesupport of computer technologies. The AWL was compiled from ‘‘. . . a corpus of3.5 million running words of written academic texts by examining the range andfrequency of words outside the first 2,000 most frequently occurring words ofEnglish . .,’’ (Coxhead, 2000, 213). Readily available on the Internet (http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/div1/awl/), the AWL presents words and word families thatoccur with high frequency across academic content areas such as the Arts, Com-merce, Law, and Science. The AWL features 570 headwords (stem nouns and verb

Table 1

The combination of stress, intonation, and vowel reduction in a number of words

Explain

Explanation Exploit Exploitation

Tonic accent

�+ ��+� �+ ��+�

Stress

�+ +�+� �+ +�+�

Full vowel

�+ +�+� �+ +++�

Adapted from Ladefoged (2001), p. 97.

64 J. Murphy, M. Kandil / System 32 (2004) 61–74

forms) of major word families. These macro-level lexical items are clustered into 10sublists of 60 word families each (with the exception of sublist 10 which contains 30word families) based on the range, frequency, and uniformity of frequency in thecorpus Coxhead examined. While the AWL was generated for purposes of EAPvocabulary and reading instruction, after examining Coxhead’s work we realizedthat it could also serve as a useful resource for teachers who prepare EAP learners asmore competent speakers and listeners in academic settings.

To gain a clearer picture of how to sequence the introduction of word-stress pat-terns in EAP courses, we examined the frequency of occurrence of word-level stresspatterns within the full AWL inventory. Our purpose was to provide information toenhance an important dimension of EAP speech-intelligibility curriculum planningfor which few supports are available to date. By focusing on the AWL we identifiedstress patterns for lexical items that intermediate to advanced level EAP learnerswould recognize as being relevant to their continuing development as intelligibleEnglish speakers. Equipped with information on the frequency of occurrence ofstress patterns in the AWL, teachers can also build learner awareness of the functionof related phenomena, such as suffixation, in academic words. For many Englishwords, ‘‘a change of suffix not only brings about a shift in stress but also a change inthe accompanying vowel reduction or neutralization in the unstressed syllable’’(Celce-Murcia et al., 1996, p. 137). Table 2 illustrates some of the predictable waysin which suffixation alters word-level stress patterns in English. In the conclusionsection to this report, we emphasize the importance of introducing EAP learners tosuch predictable patterns in conjunction with the frequency data reported in thestudy.

3. Method

We examined patterns of word-stress as revealed in the 525 polysyllabic head-words featured in the AWL and the additional 2454 polysyllabic words included inthe AWL sublists, or 2979 lexical items in all. We excluded from our analysis the 64monosyllabic words that appear in the AWL inventories because our focus wasword-level stress of polysyllabic words. The number of syllables of individual AWLitems ranges from two syllables, culture, to seven syllables, unidentifiable. Whenanalyzing these 2979 items, we classified each word according to total number ofsyllables, location of the word’s primary stressed syllable, and location of the word’ssecondary stressed syllable(s) (if any). We recognized that many polysyllabic wordsin English have more than one secondary stressed syllable. In North AmericanEnglish (NAE), for example, the word revolutionary is a six-syllable word with pri-mary stress on its third syllable and secondary stresses on both its first and fifthsyllables. The reference tool we used to identify and classify word-stress patterns wasthe Internet-based ‘Dictionary.com’ [http://dictionary.com]. This contemporary toolwas developed in Los Angeles by North American lexicographers (the Lexico Pub-lishing Group) and reflects a preference for NAE patterns of pronunciation. Whendoubts arose as to preferred pronunciations, we also consulted the American

J. Murphy, M. Kandil / System 32 (2004) 61–74 65

Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin, 2000). From these reference materials, weclassified AWL items according to the first pronunciation listed by our sources’pronunciation keys. For the small number of two-syllable words that may vary insyntactic function as either nouns or verbs depending upon location of word-levelstress (e.g., conduct, survey, progress), we divided this set of thirty words (18 head-words, 12 sublist words) in half and classified half of them as nouns and the otherhalf as verbs.

Preliminary analysis indicated that across the entire AWL inventory the mostfrequent pattern of word-level stress coincides with words of three syllables thatcarry primary stress on the second syllable (e.g., assessment, consistent, specifics). Webegan to refer to this highest frequency pattern as the basic ‘3-2’ pattern. That is, theinitial number ‘30 indicates that all of these words have three syllables; the number‘2’ following the hyphen signals that primary stress falls on the words’ second syl-lables. Once we had determined how many syllables are in a target word and loca-tion of its primary stressed syllable, we used our numeric system as short hand forcategorizing individual words. While the word assessment is classified as a 3-2 word,we characterize a word such as theoretical as a 5-3-1 word. The inclusion of a thirddigit in the word’s numeric description signals both (a) the presence and (b) locationof a secondary stressed syllable. That is, the descriptor 5-3-1 signals that theoreticalis a five syllable word (the number 5 is the descriptor’s initial digit), primary stressfalls on its third syllable (the number 3 is the descriptor’s second digit), there is anoccurrence of secondary stress (the appearance of a third digit in the descriptor), andlocation of this word’s secondary stressed syllable coincides with its first syllable (thenumeric value of the descriptor’s third digit). Of course, some words in English havemore than a single secondary stressed syllable. To illustrate, we begin our char-

Table 2

Illustrations of the effect of suffixation on word-level stress

Key: /=Primary stress location (also bolded with CAPITAL LETTERS)

\=secondary stress location (also in CAPITAL LETTERS)

_=reduced vowel

_ / _ _

\ _ / _ \ _ _ / _

aCADemy

AcaDEMic AcadeMIcian

\ _ /

_ / _ _ \ _ / _

PHOtoGRAPH

phoTOGraphy PHOtoGRAPHic

/ _ \

_ / _ _ \ _ / _

REaLIZE

reALity REaLIStic

_ / _ _

\ _ / _ _ / _ _

asTRONomy

AStroNOMic asTRONomer

_ / _ _

\ _ / _ _ / _ _

eCONomy

EcoNOMic eCONomist

– Adapted from Celce-Murcia et al., 1996, p. 137.

66 J. Murphy, M. Kandil / System 32 (2004) 61–74

acterization of the word methodology by referring to it as a 5-3 word (five syllableswith primary stress on the third syllable). However, to make our characterizationmore complete we needed conventions to indicate that this 5-3 word carries sec-ondary stresses on both its first and final syllables. To signal this information, weclassify methodology as a 5-3-1-5 word. The last two digits (i.e., the 1-5 sequence)signal the locations of secondary stresses on both its first and fifth syllables. In the‘5-3-1-5’ code we use, the final 1-5 section follows the nature order of the word (i.e.,the sequence of the ‘1’ coming before ‘5’ does not denote anything about relativedegree of secondary stress):

\

/ \ meth o dol o gy ===> . . . is a ‘5-3-1-5’ word:

1

2 3 4 5

a five syllable word with primary stress on the third syllable and secondary stresseson both its first and fifth syllables. The word has reduced vowels on both its secondand fourth syllables.

While working with individual AWL items, we examined each word in referenceto the pronunciation key of the dictionaries cited above and identified its (a) totalnumber of syllables, (b) the location of its primary stressed syllable and (c) thelocation of any secondary stressed syllable(s). We labeled each word with a relevantnumeric code—as illustrated above with the words assessment (3-2) and methodology(5-3-1-5). Once all of the words were labeled we grouped them according the stresspatterns that emerged from the data. Finally, we tallied the patterns and rankordered them according to frequency of occurrence.

4. Results

Now that the numeric conventions for characterizing individual words have beenintroduced, we are ready to present the findings of our analysis of word-stress pat-terns of AWL items. Table 3 depicts the results of our analysis of the combinedAWL polysyllabic headword and sublists inventories. The information presented incolumns A–H is arranged as follows. Columns A–F provide information on thecombined headword and sublists inventories (2979 items in all). Column A lists thefull inventory of word-level stress patterns we found in the AWL arranged accordingto frequency of occurrence. Column B presents one example word to illustrate eachof the stress patterns. Column C presents each stress-pattern’s numeric rankingbased on frequency of occurrence within the combined inventories (a total of 39word-stress patterns). Items in bold/italics in Columns A–C and F are the 14 word-stress patterns corresponding with 90% coverage of the AWL combined inventories.These initial 14 patterns are of high frequency of occurrence. In contrast, patterns24–39 are of very low frequency. Column D gives the total number of words corre-sponding with each of the identified stress-patterns. For Column E, we divided the

J. Murphy, M. Kandil / System 32 (2004) 61–74 67

number of words for each pattern by the total number of AWL items to present thepercentage of occurrence for each stress pattern. Column F tracks the cumulativepercentages for all of the stress patterns.

Along with our analysis of the combined AWL inventories (Columns A–F), wealso examined the AWL list of headwords and sublists separately. Column Gpresents the stress-patterns’ numeric rankings based on frequency of occurrencewithin the AWL headword inventory (only). Items in bold/italics are the nine stresspatterns corresponding with 90% coverage of the 525 item headword list. Similarly,Column H presents numeric rankings based on frequency of occurrence within the2454 sublist items (only). Items in bold/italics in Column H are the 15 stress patternscorresponding to 90% coverage of the sublists inventory. Though rank orderings arenot identical across the combined, headwords, and sublists inventories, comparisonbetween Columns C, G, and H reveal a high degree of overlap between them.

To illustrate how to work with Table 3, its first several rows may be interpreted asfollows: Row 1 indicates that the most frequent pattern (of the combined, head-word, and sublists inventories) is for three syllable words that carry primary stresson the second syllable (the basic 3-2 pattern, as discussed above). Words reflectingthis highest frequency pattern accounted for approximately nineteen percent of thecombined inventories (see Column E). Row 2 presents the second most frequentpattern: Two syllable words with primary stress on the second syllable (i.e., the 2-2pattern as in approach, compile and consume). Column D of this second row showsthat 340 words fit the 2-2 pattern, which represented approximately 11% of thecombined inventory (Column E). Column F signals that the combined percentagesfor these first two patterns represent 30% of the total number of AWL words. Rowthree presents the third most frequent pattern of the combined inventory: Foursyllable words with primary stress on the second syllable (i.e., the 4-2 pattern as incomplexity, available and appropriate). In row four we learn that the fourth mostfrequent pattern is for two syllable words with primary stress on the first syllable(the 2-1 pattern as in versions, data and classic). The fifth row presents the first word-stress pattern coinciding with an incidence of secondary stress. The fifth row’spattern is 4-3-1, which signals words of four syllables with primary stress on thethird syllable and secondary stress on the first syllable (e.g., concentration, definitionand publication). Under Column F, the cumulative percentage corresponding withrow five indicates that the first five word-stress patterns encompass 55% of thecombined inventory. If we skip down and examine row 14, we notice in Column Fthat the cumulative percentage of the 14 most frequent word-stress patternsaccounts for 90% of the combined AWL inventories.

5. Discussion

We believe the information depicted in Table 3 will be useful to EAP learners,teachers, and curriculum planners since it serves as an informative complement toother sources of information on word-stress when making decisions as to whichpatterns to feature within EAP and other ESL speech-intelligibility instructional

68 J. Murphy, M. Kandil / System 32 (2004) 61–74

Table 3

Word-level stress patterns of the AWLa

(A)

(B) (C) (D) (E) (F) (G) (H)

Stress pattern

Example word Ranking of

combined

inventories

No. of

words

%

Cumulative%

(rounded)

Ranking

within

headword

list (only)

Ranking

within

sublists

(only)

3-2

commitment 1 556 18.66 19 1 1

2-2

approach 2 340 11.41 30 3 2

4-2

complexity 3 264 8.86 39 5 3

2-1

versions 4 257 8.62 48 2 5

4-3-1

economic 5 236 7.92 55 6 4

3-1

analyst 6 196 6.58 62 4 7

4-1-3

qualitative 7 178 5.98 68 9 6

3-1-3

institute 8 150 5.04 73 8 8

5-3-1

methodologies 9 112 3.76 77 11 9

5-2-4

discriminating 10 95 3.19 80 16 10

4-2-4

facilitate 11 80 2.69 83 14 11

4-1

variable 12 71 2.38 85 13 12

3-3-1

guarantee 13 68 2.28 87 12 13

2-1-2

networks 14 64 2.15 90 7 16

5-2

considerable 15 60 2.01 92 15 14

6-3-1

philosophically 16 49 1.64 93 24 15

5-4-1

implementation 17 34 1.14 94 18 17

5-4-2

environmental 18 30 1.01 95 10 20

3-1-2

formatted 19 22 0.74 96 17 19

4-1-4

visualize 20 21 0.70 97 18

5-1-4

regulatory 21 17 0.57 21

6-4-2

predictability 22 13 0.44 98 22

6-5-2

intensification 23 11 0.37 23

6-4-1

variability 24 10 0.34 24

7. . . . .a

inevitability (7-5-2) 25 9 0.30 99 25

3-3

unaware 26 7 0.23 26

5-2-5

contexualize 27 5 0.17 27

5-2-1-4

incorporated 28 4 0.13 28

5-1-3

specifiable 29 3 0.10 29

6-5-1

re-evaluation 30 3 0.10 30

6-2-5

conceptualizing 31 3 0.10 31

6-2

inevitably 32 3 0.10 22 33

6-2-4

administratively 33 2 0.07 32

6-1-3

justifiably 34 1 0.03 36

6-5-3-1

differentiation 35 1 0.03 23

5-1

culturally 36 1 0.03 35

4-4-1

nevertheless 37 1 0.03 19

4-2-1

practitioner 38 1 0.03 20

3-2-3

adulthood 39 1 0.03 100 34

Columns A–F: Headwords and Sublist items combined (N=2979). Bold/Italics signals items within 90%

coverage range.a There were four different word-stress patterns for seven-syllable words. We group them together since

all were of very low frequency and no single pattern was applicable to more than two words.

J. Murphy, M. Kandil / System 32 (2004) 61–74 69

units. The feasibility of structuring and sequencing EAP instructional materialsaccording to the criteria depicted in Table 3 remains unclear. A reason is that thecontent-organization of the discipline being studied takes precedence over formalproperties of the linguistic system in most EAP courses. With respect to the learningand teaching of EAP vocabulary, however, Cobb and Horst (2001) argue that iflearners have to wait to meet relatively more important words in natural occurrence,they will never encounter enough of them to become competent readers of academicmaterials. Rather, these researchers propose a learner-as-lexicographer approachwhere EAP learners work from the AWL and collaborate online to find examples intexts tied to the content areas they are studying. A possibility for speech-intellig-ibility instruction is to follow a similar approach in connection with the teaching ofword-level stress phenomena. Learners can work with patterns that have been iden-tified as high in frequency, and/or with sets of words that correspond with high fre-quency patterns, and collaborate with others to find examples of occurrence in bothcourse materials and topic-related library and online resources.

Through reference to the information on pattern frequency depicted in Table 3,EAP teachers could feature the explicit teaching of patterns of word stress as anormal part of the instructional routine. To introduce the concept of word-stress,for example, teachers might preview assigned reading or lecture materials to identifykey words that illustrate the 3-2 pattern (e.g., assessment, consistent, establish). Animplication of our analysis is that it should be easy to find such examples. Atappropriate points during class, learners may be reminded of (and practise in con-texts of phrases and sentences) this highest frequency pattern. To reinforce the ideathat locations of word-level stress reflect predictable phenomena, teachers might usean example such as consistent to explain that in English, word stress rarely falls onsyllables that historically entered the language as a prefix (con-) or suffix (-tent).Because 3-2 words are very high in frequency of occurrence, this pattern may serveas a useful anchor when expanding learner awareness of word-level stress phenom-ena and related phonological features of English. With 3-2 words such as assess-ment, consistent and establish, for example, learner attention may be directed to thelocation of primary stress on the second syllable, the consistently obscured vowelquality of each of these words’ initial syllables, and the similarly unstressed/reducedquality of the words’ final syllables. Though we devised the convention of referringto such words as fitting a 3-2 pattern to ease our own discussions of AWL items,subsequently we have found that the numeric conventions for labeling stress pat-terns illustrated in this report are useful when working with EAP and other ESLlearners.

The study’s findings provide information on more common patterns teachers mayfocus upon, especially as starting points, when planning instruction. In addition, thefindings can be extended in order to exploit related English phonological featurestied to shifts in word-level stress locations due to such phenomena as suffixation,other forms of derivational morphology, and part of speech. For example, the 2-1-2pattern (e.g., network, guideline, highlight) reflects a tendency for noun compoundsin English to carry primary stress on the first syllable while maintaining secondarystress on the second syllable.

70 J. Murphy, M. Kandil / System 32 (2004) 61–74

Along with teaching the stress pattern of a high frequency AWL item such aseconomic (see Table 3’s fifth row), teachers may take advantage of the opportunitysuch words present to build learner awareness of the impacts of suffixation by alsointroducing the stress patterns of related words within the same lexical family (e.g.,eCONomy, ecoNOMical, ecoNOMically, and eCONomist). Other lexical items maybe introduced that illustrate patterns of similar shifts in word stress locations (e.g.,psyCHOLogy, psychoLOGical, psychoLOGically, and psyCHOLogist). Teachers andlearners should find the sublists and word families featured in the Internet version ofthe AWL to be especially helpful for the purpose of exploring the impact of deriva-tional morphology on shifts in word stress locations, as well as correspondingchanges in vowel quality, both within and across word families.

Rather than taking the time to provide instruction in what may appear to learnersto be an overwhelming inventory of 39 possible stress patterns in academic words,our analysis revealed that just 14 patterns encompass 90% of the polysyllabic itemsin the combined AWL headwords and sublists inventories. To illustrate this sharpdecline in order of frequency even more vividly, Fig. 1. arranges the 39 patterns indeclining order along the horizontal axis of a bar graph.

In this context, it is worth mentioning a similarity between our finding - that justa few word-level stress patterns cover most academic words—and parallel findingsof specialists who pursue a frequency approach toward curriculum planning forvocabulary instruction in general. Through word frequency analysis, Nation (1997)demonstrates that while English has a lot of words, only a few of them are usedover and over again. Estimates are that the just 2000 of the most frequent wordfamilies in English give 80% coverage of academic vocabulary and adding in theword families of the AWL gives about 90% coverage (Cobb and Horst, 2001). Thelink between these general findings on academic vocabulary and our work is thatEnglish has many word stress patterns—particularly for the items tied to Greco-Latin roots that are major constituents of the AWL—but that just a few patternsare used with great frequency. To our knowledge, this is the first study to docu-ment that a relatively small number of stress patterns are reflected in the pro-nunciations of a large number of academic words. This finding signals that theprocess of gaining control over word-level stress patterns of academic vocabularymay be more manageable than previously believed, and it should be taken asencouraging news by EAP learners and their teachers. It would be helpful, forexample, for EAP learners and teachers to prioritize their efforts by highlightingattention to words already included in course materials that fit the relativelyhigher-frequency patterns. Such an instructional focus will help to ensure that EAPlearners are comfortable in working with a large proportion of word-level stresspatterns of the combined inventories. At 90% coverage, we consider an inventoryof the fourteen most frequent patterns to be a manageable number to feature ineither courses or lesson segments of EAP speech-intelligibility instruction. It is alsorevealing to learn that the remaining ten percent of AWL items are tied to 25additional patterns, each of which is of relatively low frequency of occurrence (seeTable 3 and Fig. 1). Such information illuminates where learners with beginning tohigh-intermediate levels of proficiency in English can most profitably spend their

J. Murphy, M. Kandil / System 32 (2004) 61–74 71

72 J. Murphy, M. Kandil / System 32 (2004) 61–74

Fig

.1.

time and energy when it comes to learning to recognize, identify, and use stresspatterns of polysyllabic words.

The information depicted in Table 3 should prove useful as a complementarysource of information for purposes of curriculum and lesson planning and privatestudy. Because listeners in academic settings depend upon word-stress signals tointerpret incoming messages, the same information has implication for purposes ofEAP listening training, as well. EAP learners are more likely to respond well tospeech-intelligibility training informed by our analysis since the frequency data weidentified is a useful complement to information already available in the literature(e.g., ways in which word-level stress and vowel quality change due to impacts ofsuffixation and other forms of derivational morphology). As such, these combinedsources of information may contribute in important ways to a dimension of speech-intelligibility training with ties to enhancing more active use of vocabulary knowl-edge. The next stages of our work will report on EAP learners’ responses to word-level stress speech-intelligibility training sequenced around the 14 highest frequencypatterns depicted in Table 3.

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