VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST - GRADUATE STUDIES *********************** AN INVESTIGATION INTO ENGLISH WORD STRESS MISTAKES COMMONLY COMMITTED BY 12TH GRADE STUDENTS AT BACH DANG HIGH SCHOOL IN QUANG YEN DISTRICT, QUANG NINH PROVINCE AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS TO IMPROVE ENGLISH WORD STRESS LEARNING M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111 HA NOI – 2016 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST - GRADUATE STUDIES *********************** AN INVESTIGATION INTO ENGLISH WORD STRESS MISTAKES COMMONLY COMMITTED BY 12TH GRADE STUDENTS AT BACH DANG HIGH SCHOOL IN QUANG YEN DISTRICT, QUANG NINH PROVINCE AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS TO IMPROVE ENGLISH WORD STRESS LEARNING M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111 HA NOI – 2016 DECLARATION I certify that this thesis, which is submitted to The Faculty of Post – Graduate Studies for the degree of Master of Arts, is entirely my own work, except where I have given fully-documented references to the work of others I have not been submitted this thesis for assessment for any other course of study Hanoi, 2016 Ph i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincerest thanks to my supervisor, Mr Vo Dai Quang, for his generous assistance and guidance while I was doing this study I am really grateful to him for his precious advice and constant support I would also like to send my special thanks to the teachers and students at Bach Dang high school, who have helped me in providing the materials for my data collection procedure I am also in debt of my lecturers, my friends, my classmates as well as my colleagues for their invaluable comments and criticism Last but not least, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my beloved people, my parents, my brother, and my husband who have always encouraged me to complete this project ii ABSTRACT In an attempt to have an investigation into word stress mistakes committed by 12th grade students at Bach Dang high school, Quang Yen, Quang Ninh, the research objectives set forth for the research were to: (1) investigate English word stress mistakes commonly committed by 12th grade students at Bach Dang high school, (2) figure out the causes of these mistakes, (3) and, propose some possible solutions for both teachers and learners to improve English word stress learning The subjects of the study were 78 students at grade 12 The research was investigated through two instruments: questionnaires for students and students’ voice recording It is found that students made word stress mistakes mostly in polysyllable words and compound words Besides, there was a certain difference in the way students did the written tests and the way students pronounced With the investigation into students’ word stress mistakes, the researcher found out some possible causes of those mistakes In detail, the mistakes were supposed to result of both subjective and objective causes From the findings of the investigation procedure, the researcher proposed some possible solutions for teachers, students and book designers to deal with word stress mistakes Although the study has offered some insightful findings, like many other studies, there are some limitations, and therefore, it needs suggestions and comments from other colleagues and those who are concerned iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT iii TABLE OF CONTENTS iv CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background to the study 1.2 Statement of the problem 1.3 Objectives of the study 1.4 Scope of the study 1.5 Significance of the study 1.6 Design of the study CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Role of mistakes in language learning 2.2 Role of stress in language learning 2.3 Theoretical background to the concept “stress” 2.3.1 Syllables 2.3.2 Strong and weak syllables 2.3.3 Nature of stress 2.3.3.1 The loudness 2.3.3.2 The length 2.3.3.3 The pitch 10 2.3.3.4 The vowel quality 10 2.3.4 Placement of Stress within the word 10 2.3.5 Some rules for word stress marking 11 2.3.5.1 Proper nouns 11 2.3.5.2 Monosyllabic words (1 syllable words) 11 2.3.5.3 Bi-syllabic words 11 iv 2.3.5.4 Poly-syllabic words 13 2.3.5.5 Compound words 15 2.3.6 Levels of stress 15 2.3.7 Weak forms of words (Reducing function words) 16 2.4 Possible causes of word stress mistakes 16 2.5 Teaching and learning word stress of 12th grade students at Bach Dang high school 19 2.5.1 Word stress lessons designed in the textbook English 12 19 2.5.2 Language teaching and learning reality at BachDang high school 21 2.6 Summary 23 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 24 3.1 Research questions 24 3.2 The subjects 24 3.3 Research methods 24 3.3.1 Questionnaire 24 3.3.2 Voice recording2 25 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 26 4.1 Findings from the questionnaire 26 4.1.1 Part 26 4.1.1.1 Students’ attitude towards learning word stress 26 4.1.1.2 Students’ awareness of the difficulty in stress lessons 26 4.1.1.3 Students’ degree of certainty in word stress marking 27 4.1.1.4 Frequency of students’ mistakes in word stress2 27 4.1.1.5 Students’ most common mistakes in word stress 28 4.1.1.6 Students’ expectation towards the teaching of word stress 29 4.1.2 Part 29 4.1.2.1 Scores students get in marking word stress 29 4.1.2.2 Detail in all lexical items 30 4.2 Findings from the voice recording 31 v 4.3 Cause of mistakes in word stress 33 4.3.1 Influence of mother tongue 33 4.3.2 Inappropriateness in the textbook English 12 34 4.3.3 Lack of teaching and learning facilities 34 4.3.4 Students’ lack of motivation and concern 34 4.3.5 English examination format 35 4.4 Possible solutions to improve English word stress learning 35 4.4.1 To teachers 35 4.4.2 To students 37 4.4.3 To the course book designers 37 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 39 5.1 Recapitulation 39 5.2 Conclusion 39 5.3 Limitation of the study 40 5.4 Suggestions for further study 40 REFERENCES 41 APPENDIX I vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS EFL English as a Foreign Language ELT English Language Teaching IPA International Phonetic Alphabet L1 A first language L2 A second language SLLs Second Language Learners vii LIST OF FIGURES Pages Figure 1: Students’ attitude towards learning English word stress 26 Figure 2: Students’ awareness of the difficulty in word stress lessons 26 Figure 3: Students’ degree of certainty in word stress marking 27 Figure 4: Frequency of students’ mistakes in word stress 27 Figure 5: Students’ most common mistakes in word stress 28 Figure 6: Students’ expectation towards the teaching of word stress 29 Figure 7: Students’ scores in marking word stress 29 Figure 8: Number of students with incorrect marking 30 Figure 9: Difference between marking in paper and pronunciation in voice recording 31 viii 15 14 15 14 15 13 15 15 14 12 14 12 10 13 11 11 13 11 12 13 11 13 13 10 14 13 11 15 13 10 16 12 10 17 12 10 18 11 10 19 11 11 10 22 10 23 10 10 24 25 8 26 27 6 28 29 5 30 ên Figure 9: Difference between marking in paper and pronunciation in voice recording 32 The researcher chooses the number of students for voice recording in accordance with the ratio among three groups of students: students of high scores (16-20) : students of medium scores (10-15) : students of low scores (0-10) of : 50 : 20 That is to say, the researcher chooses students from the first groups, 20 from the second and from the final The most remarkable and common feature here is that the number of correct answers in paper is higher than that in voice recording in all three groups of students It is maybe because students almost are taught to focus on written tests but not oral tests Especially, some students: Nguy n c Hi u and ng Th Th m seem to pronounce asked lexical items rashly They not have perception on syllables, not mention to stress While there are students with very good pronunciation, there remain students with poor quality, even it is sometimes incomprehensible for listeners when they pronounce Obviously, the dramatic difference here is quite large which leads to considerable challenges for teachers to teach in a multi-level class 4.3 Causes of mistakes in word stress 4.3.1 Influence of mother tongue The principal cause of the students’ mistakes belongs to the influence of mother tongue The differences between Vietnamese and English cause obstacles to them when they learn how to pronounce words with stress patterns in English In Vietnamese, the majority of words are mono-syllabic except for some compound words, which also have separate syllable and distinctive tone such as: xa x i m p ng t ng o… Therefore, Vietnamese students deal all the syllables with the same loudness, length and pitch In other words, they give the equal stress to all syllables This characteristic should be considered as the primary reason for such above mistakes 33 4.3.2 Inappropriateness in the textbook English 12 Word stress is evidently not a new issue when students start studying English However, at high school, not until students reach the 12th grade, are they taught stress officially Concerning the textbook English 12, there are only three units mentioning word stress issue, however, it is just a list of words without stress rules Besides, students seem to be overloaded with lots of new words at the same time with new structures and uses of grammar Although teachers try to focus on grammar to cope with written tests designed in Vietnam, they are many times in a hurry in teaching to meet the time allowance required in the syllabus As a consequence, they sometimes have to skip activities in some quite long lessons or they teach so quickly that students, particularly the weak ones, are hardly able to understand what the teachers are talking about It is the inequality between the time allowance in the curriculum and the content of the lesson that is to be blamed for students’ mistakes 4.3.3 Lack of teaching and learning facilities With the current teaching and learning facilities at Bach Dang high school, teachers and the students lack a good environment for mastering foreign languages, hence they find it unfeasible to improve their English teaching and learning especially in terms of stress Their work would be much better if there were more modern facilities supplied such as a laboratory room or a room full of computers with the internet service for both teachers and students to search for the latest suitable information To adapt that kind of active methods, teachers should be aware of the importance of renovating their teaching methods as well as making use of modern devices in teaching foreign languages in order to have students’ interest in learning English 4.3 d ’ f d Another cause lies in the fact that the students lack motivation and concern from their teachers Students say that they are not encouraged to learn word stress in an effective way That means the teachers themselves have not paid enough attention 34 to renovating their teaching methods in order to help their students with word stress However, teachers in general often find teaching a multilevel class challenging and it is also difficult to design lesson plans sufficiently On the other hand, in the process of learning and teaching, Vietnamese teachers and learners tend to care more about the fluency (how fast their students can speak), about the vocabulary (how many words their students can remember) and about grammar (how exact their students can write) but less about the accuracy, that is, how they can speak a sentence with correct stress pattern and intonation 4.3.5 English examination format Last but not least, although English in the Vietnamese examination system is among mandatory subjects, the paper tests are designed with only around two questions of word stress marking, which accounts for a very minor weight in scores Students seem to choose correct answers basing on their theoretical perception but not to be required to pronounce orally It is undeniable that students are under pressure of grades for exam and not encouraged to improve their communicative ability in high school This explains why Vietnamese students may get high scores in paper but almost cannot use English confidently in communication 4.4 Possible solutions to improve English word stress learning With all the findings and discussions presented in the previous sections of this study, this session offers some solutions to surmount these above problems Hopefully, they will be helpful to the teaching and learning of English word stress of the teachers and students at Bach Dang high school in particular and Vietnamese teachers and students in general 4.4.1 To teachers In order to attract their students, teachers of English should make their lessons more and more interesting That means the teachers should find out different methods to motivate students to learn and improve their knowledge of word stress If the techniques employed in the lessons are various and suitable, they will make their lessons easier to understand and more interesting for students to get involved then, 35 mistake occurrence will reduce as much as possible They should choose suitable techniques for the levels of their students and start from building students’ awareness of the importance of word stress to applying the right processes of teaching pronunciation from accuracy to fluency At accuracy level, students should be taught the nature of syllable, stress, important elements and stress rules suitable to their levels In terms of fluency, Tench (1981:42) defined: “Fluent pronunciation is the smooth joining of phonemes and larger elements at an acceptable speed of delivery” At this level, teachers should use a variety of techniques used to teach pronunciation as well as stress such as: Conducting, tapping, backward build up or back-chaining, tongue twister, games, etc In detail, students may be asked to prepare short reports in English on various aspects of English word stress such as the rules for compounds, poly-syllabi words, weak forms, and so forth to discuss in groups Teachers should provide references for students and offers consultation to them Upon completion, the reports are presented in class orally Besides, students can be invited to become teachers of the class This suggestion can be appropriate to teachers who like creative activities Students can be chosen to teach the class for about 10-15 minutes They are asked to teach some rules of stress patterns or design activities on stress Their performance will be observed and graded by the teachers By this way, students may feel respected and trusted in their studying On the other hand, teachers may make use of simple devices, radio for example Especially, when teaching vocabularies, instead of applying traditional methods: write new words on board, give meanings in Vietnamese and pronounce modally for students to repeat, teachers may record the way the native speakers pronounce and give students chances to listen to and repeat the native’s pronunciation Thanks to this simple renovation, students may feel like being instructed by the native English 36 4.4.2 To students Beside teachers’ roles, students must be active in their studying Students should be aware that working on word stress in a carefully organized way will help them to become better understood and more confident speakers To cope with difficulties in learning word stress, students are advised to building up a habit of discovering learning sources at home One way to make students happier with their pronunciation classes is to allow them to work with their favorite English songs, films, radio program or any other enjoyable supplements to the necessary drills and exercises Furthermore, students should be asked to find material illustrating a certain aspect of pronunciation When studying in stress, they can search for clips which illustrate the differences between emotional and unemotional speech and then imitate exactly what is pronounced in clips However, the materials are first assessed by the teacher who selects the most promising examples to be used in class, based on aesthetic value and the occurrence of phonetically interesting phenomena When it comes to obstacles, one of the biggest problems most students face in learning a new language is their own fear They worry that they not say things correctly or that they will look stupid so they are afraid of speaking The fastest way to learn anything is to it again and again until they get it right In a same way, learning English requires practice Students should not let a little fear stop them from getting what they want They should keep talking to themselves and talk about everything slowly and accurately first If they feel shy, they should it in the privacy of their own home and then try reading out loud until they feel comfortable hearing their own voice in English If possible, they had better record their own voice This will help them find out their weaknesses in pronunciation 4.4.3 To the course book designers The course book designers should pay more attention to the role of pronunciation especially stress aspect provided in the text books for students As far as the researcher is concerned, only 12 graders in Vietnam can have a chance to deal with 37 stress, which causes students’ lack of concern in this field Therefore, 10 and 11 graders even primary and secondary students should be taught to become familiar with the basic knowledge of stress with a view to improving their speaking as well as their language competence In addition, the new course books should be designed with more tape scripts read by native speakers Thanks to this reformation, learners get chances to listen and speak more beside reading and writing as usual By that way, learners can imitate the pronunciations of English words more appropriately and properly As a consequence, learners find English stress more exciting and they will be more motivated in study 38 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 5.1 Recapitulation This survey study is a thorough analysis of mistakes on word stress made by 12 graders at Bach Dang high school The mistakes were collected and analyzed from a list of twenty lexical items in the questionnaire and voice recording The findings of the study are presented as follows:  In terms of the attitude towards word stress learning, the students are not interested in learning word stress because it has not been much relevant and they have not been motivated  In terms of mistakes, the subjects’ mostly common mistakes on word stress are: Their more confusion in marking stress for compound words and polysyllabic words; besides, there is a great difference between the way students mark stress in paper theoretically and the way they pronounce lexical items practically  In terms of mistake causes, it is concluded that those word stress mistakes are due to the influence of Vietnamese on English learners, the inappropriateness in the textbook, the substandard learning condition as well as the lack of motivations from the teachers Beside the findings, some solutions to these above problems have been mentioned All the suggestions are concerned with how to improve the teaching and learning of word stress These solutions are for teachers, for students and for course book designers as well 5.2 Conclusion It can be concluded that stress is a really difficult aspect in the process of learning, and stress mistakes still happen with most of the students, from the elementary to the advanced ones Hard as it is, word stress and stress mistake correcting need more attention and more effort from both learners and teachers The findings also indicate that teachers need to teach students to hear and predict where stress falls in words For the most part, stress placement in English words is a rule-governed phenomenon, and explicit teaching of word stress patterns should be part of the EFL pronunciation curriculum When introducing new vocabulary items, 39 teachers should be as concerned about correct stress patterns as they correct usage Moreover, teachers should ensure that students are able to stress new vocabulary items correctly It is advisable to begin the presentation of word stress with a brief discussion of the nature of stress This can be followed up with an introduction of the fixed stress patterns that occur in certain categories of words such as compound nouns, words beginning with prefixes or suffixes Because of the complexity of word stress rules in general, it is important that teachers be encouraged to reinforce classroom explanation of specific word stress rules with both in-class and out-ofclass opportunities for students to learn word stress effectively 5.3 Limitation of the study Although the study has offered some insightful findings, like many other studies, there are some limitations: Firstly, the study is limited in the fact that it may not really reflect all the problems that are facing students at 12th grade in learning English word stress Secondly, in terms of language competence, word stress on its own cannot be the core for students to become better, it is also the sentence stress, which is not included in this study, as well Moreover, the research only applied to a small area with a small number of subjects Thus, the result is not completely universal true 5.4 Suggestions for further study On the basics of the findings and the limitations of the study, the following suggestions were presented for further study: As indicated, it is suggested that the limitations of the study will be overcome in further studies with an increased number of participants and class observations should be taken place to find out more reliable information Besides, next linguistic researchers may carry out studies on sentence stress so that teachers and students can take advantages to improve their English language teaching and learning To sum up, due to time and experience, limitations are unavoidable Any suggestions and comments from other colleagues will be highly appreciated 40 REFERENCES Avery, P & Erhlich, S (1992) Teaching American English Pronunciation Oxford University Press Basal, R.K, 1966 “The Intelligibility of Indian English” Ph.D Thesis London: London University Bai, A (1994) Twenty questions In A Brown, ed Approaches to pronunciation teaching London: Macmillan 1–17 Brown, R., & McNeill, D 1978 “The tip of the tongue” Phenomenon Chomsky, N & Morris, H (1968) The sound pattern of English New York: Harper and Row Cook, V.J (1993) Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition Mac Millan, Basingstoke Corder, S.P (1967) The Significance of Learner’s errors International Review of Applied Linguistics London: OUP Crystal, D (1994) Documenting rhythmical change In J Windsor Lewis (ed.), Studies in general and English phonetics, Routledge, pp 174-9 Cutler, A 1980 “Slip of the tongue” New York , Academic Press 10 Dauer R.M ( 1992) Accurate English Regents Prentice Hall 11 Davis, S.M & Kelly, M.H (1997) Knowledge of the English noun-verb stress difference by native and nonnative speakers Journal of Memory and Language 36, pp 445-460 12 Dulay H.C., Burt M.K and Krashen S.D.(1982) Language Two Oxford: OUP 13 Edge, J (1989) Mistakes and Correction Longman Group UK Limited 14 Fromkin, V A 1976 Putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle In L Hyman (Ed.), Studies in stress and accent Los Angeles: Univ of Southern California Pp 15-26 15 Fry, D.B (1958) Experiments in the perception of stress Language and Speech 1, pp 126-52 41 16 Garnes, S & Bond, Z S 1975 Slips of the ear: Errors in perception of casual speech In Papers from the Eleventh Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society 17 Garrett, M F 1975 The analysis of sentence production In G Bower (Ed.), Psychology of learning and motivation (Vol 9) New York: Academic Press Pp 133-177 18 Ghorbany, Z (2011) EFL learners’ awareness of stress: Moving versus neutral suffixes English Language Teaching 4(4), pp 146-153 19 Gilbert, J.B (1978) Gadgets: Non-verbal tools for teaching pronunciation In A Brown (ed.), Teaching English pronunciation: A book of readings, Routledge, pp 308-322 20 Hammond, M (1999) The phonology of English Oxford: Oxford University Press 21 Hahn, L.D (2004) Primary stress and intelligibility: Research to motivate the teaching of suprasegmentals TESOL Quarterly 38, pp 201-223 22 John, D (1998) The Practice of English Language Teaching (New York: Longman) 23 John, D (2001) An outline of Engish Phonetics (New York: Longman) 24 Hoàng Văn Vân (chủ biên), (2013), Tiếng Anh 12, Nhà Xu t Giáo dục, Hà Nội 25 Hubicka, O (1981) Phonology: Stress Practical English Teaching 1(3) 26 Kenworthy, J (1987) Teaching English pronunciation Longman 27 Lennon, P (1991) Errors- Some Problems of Definition, Identification and Distinction Applied Linguistics, Vol 12, No Oxford University Press 28 Madeline Hewings (1979) Pronunciation Practice Activities- A Resource Book For Teaching English Pronunciation Cambridge University press 29 Parviz Birzandi and Mohammad Ali Salmani Nodoshan (2005) An Introduction To Phonetics University of Zanjan 42 30 Pennington M.C (1996) Phonology in English Language Teaching- An International Approach Longman 31 Roach, P 1983 “English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course” Cambridge : Cambridge University Press 32 Slinker S ( 1969) Pronunciation Skills Macmillian Publishers 33 Taft, M & Forster, K I 1975 Lexical storage and retrieval of prefixed words Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 14, 638-647 34 Taylor, J.C (1996) Stress Analysis London: Longman 35 Trinh Phan Thu Trang (2002) A Study on Some Most Common Errors Made by Pre-intermediate Students of Non-major English at Hanoi Junior Teacher’s Training College MA thesis Hanoi Open University 36 Vogel, I & Raimy, E (2002) The acquisition of compound versus phrasal stress: The role of the prosodic constituents Journal of Child Language 29, pp 225-250 37 Yan M.C (1987) Phonology in English Language Teaching - An International Approach Longman 43 APPENDIX SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE FOR STUDENTS This questionnaire is a part of a survey study conducted by Duyen, Pham Thi Mai an M.A candidate at the Post Graduate Department, Vietnam National University, Ha noi This questionnaire is focused on investigating the mistakes in word stress commonly made by 12th graders in Bach Dang high school in Quang Ninh This survey with options will take you no longer than 20 minutes to complete Your answers and the information you provide in the questionnaire will remain confidential Thank you very much for your time and support! * Your name: _ * I have learned English for: years The questionnaire is composed of two parts Part is to find down your attitude towards English word stress, and Part is to check the extent you master the rules of word stress marking PART 1: Please make your answer by circling the letter before the option you find appropriate Question 1: How you find word stress learning? a Interesting b Moderate c Boring Question 2: To what extent you find English word stress lessons at school? a Easy b Moderate c Difficult Question 3: Are you sure about your decision in marking word stress? a Absolutely sure b Sure c Fairly sure d Not sure Question How often you make mistakes in word stress? a Never b Seldom c Sometimes d Often Question What are the most common mistakes in word stress that you often encounter? (You may circle more than one option) a Failure to distinguish parts of speech I b Stress on the wrong syllable of poly-syllabic words c Stress on the wrong syllable of compound words d Equal stress for all syllables Other (please specify) parts of speech: t lo i (danh t / ộng t /t nh t …) poly-syllabic words: t c nhi u âm ti t – âm ti t tr l n (development, intelligent) compound word: t gh p (blackboard, policeman) Question How you like your teacher teaching word stress in the classroom? (You may circle more than one option) a Give you chances to listen to native speakers’ voices regularly b Motivate you to learn word stress by providing various activities (games, exercises, etc in word stress) c Ask you to look up new words with transcriptions in the dictionary before going to school d Ask you to learn by heart all the new words with their stress patterns Other (please specify) PART 2: “ˈ ” b f b w d f f w w ds repetition applicability mountaineer contract (n) biography contract (v) answer Northern Ireland accidental academic greenhouse musician disappear modernize bad-tempered homesick For example: inˈsist important entertain enjoy II basketball APPENDIX VOICE RECORDING In accordance with the result in Questionnaire, you are chosen to make a voice recording Please pronounce these following words clearly, remember to introduce who you are before recording repetition 11 enjoy applicability 12 basketball mountaineer 13 homesick contract (n) 14 musician Northern Ireland 15 greenhouse answer 16 bad-tempered contract (v) 17 academic biography 18 modernize important 19 accidental 10 entertain 20 disappear Thank you very much III ... English word stress, the researcher decides to choose the title: An investigation into English word stress mistakes commonly committed by 12th grade students at Bach Dang high school in Quang Yen... this project ii ABSTRACT In an attempt to have an investigation into word stress mistakes committed by 12th grade students at Bach Dang high school, Quang Yen, Quang Ninh, the research objectives... UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST - GRADUATE STUDIES *********************** AN INVESTIGATION INTO ENGLISH WORD STRESS MISTAKES COMMONLY COMMITTED BY 12TH