Study on Korean EFL Learners' Stress Shift Realizations in Three Suffix Patterns : stress-moving, stress-carrying and neutral suffixes

Abstract

The study intends to emprically investigate Korean EFL learners realizations of stress shift where three patterns of suffix - stress-moving (e.g. -ity, -ic, -ion, -ian), stress-carrying(e.g. -een, -ese, -ee, -eer) and neutral suffixes (e.g. -al, -ment, -able, -hood) – are added to a word base. In order of difficulty, stress placement with stress-carrying suffixes poses greatest challenge upon Korean EFL learners, followed by stress-moving and lastly stress-neutral suffixes as the least challenging stress pattern among the three. Despite unfamiliarity with the words of the suffix-carrying pattern, the analysis of the three stress patterns uniquely reveals that stress error of a derived form might be led by stress error in the word base. To address this problem, explicit teaching of word stress patterns should be further reinforeced as an integral part of the ESL/EFL instruction particularly by clarifying the systematic patterns of stress placement in English words.