Judgements of EFL Students on English Stress Placement

Abstract

The purposes of the study were to investigate the knowledge related to the stress in English at the word level and the sentence level gained by 2^nd – 4^th year Thai students majoring in English and to compare the scores of the knowledge test obtained by the students with different years of their study and different faculties of their affiliations. The randomly selected sample consisted of 190 participants out of 321 volunteers, the 2^nd - 4^th year English majors. The research instrument was a Test to Measure the Knowledge of English Stress (TMKES) at the word and sentence levels used to collect the data, and the statistics that were utilized to analyze the data included frequency, mean, standard deviations, and One-Way ANOVA. The findings of the study showed that students who took the test were able to score over half of the total on average. The students’ competence in English stress was not significantly different due to their different years of study. However, the students who were affiliated with different faculties had the significantly different competence in English word stress excluding English sentence stress. Additionally, when the scores of both the word stress and the sentence stress were combined, there was a statistically significant difference owing to the distinguishable affiliations.