The distress in not stressing and destressing stress in English: Using wordplay to boost awareness, intelligibility, and communicative competence

Abstract

Stress is an integral part of conveying meaning in English at not only the level of the word but also the phrase and rhetoric where it is exploited in English in literature, humor, advertising, and more. Simultaneously, stress marks language variation in regional, generational, and ethnic dialects. Thus, stress bears a great functional load and social load in communicative competence. Yet stress is not generally fully addressed in English as a second language courses. Minimal stress pairs such as a record (noun) versus to record (verb), a black board versus a blackboard, to walk the walk, and so on provide, along with other types of wordplay, an optimal method to have learners notice and practice stress. When combined with a systematic teaching approach informed by second language phonology (intelligibility, comprehensive range of pronunciation from metalinguistic awareness to phonological processes, simultaneous focus on both form and function) and pronunciation/language teaching praxis (noticing, form to function practice), using such minimal stress pairs and wordplay can boost awareness more effectively and facilitate acquisition of stress and its extensive role in English, enhancing intelligibility and communicative competence.