Difficulties of Perceiving Word and Sentence Stress Encountered by EFL Sudanese Learners: A Case Study of 4th Year Students Majoring in English at Al-Neelain University

Abstract

ABSTRACT Difficulties of Perceiving Word and Sentence Stress Encountered by EFL Sudanese Learners: a Case Study of 4"‘ Year Students Majoring in English at Al-Neelain University This dissertation investigates the difficulties of word and sentence stress faced by 4th year students majoring in English at A1-Neelain University. It examines a number of aspects concerning the area of accent and provides an insight into why English stress poses a major problem to native speakers of Sudanese colloquial Arabic. Through investigating the difficulties, the study uses instruments such as questiomlaires to gather the data based on answers given by 50 respondents representing the subjects of the study. In order to make the methodology operational to the focus of the goals of the research, a large series of tape—recorded materials and written tests have been conducted with the subjects— a corpus approach which allows larger amounts of data to be analysed, and indicates that the statistics retrieved are derived from a larger component of inquiries. The results show that stress proves to be difficult for most of the Sudanese native speakers of colloquial Arabic for several reasons: mother tongue interference, transfer of stress typology, ignorance of rule restrictions, over-generalization and ignorance of phonetic phenomena.