Abstract:
This thesis applies Phillip Carrs four - word stress assignments that are syllable
weight, compound words, morphological structure, and syntactic category. The purpose of this
thesis is to find the word stress production errors and reasons of the errors of Thai EFL 4th
-6
th
grade students and teachers. Probability sampling with random simple sampling is applied to a
select 77 students and 3 teachers from Anubannongyai School in Chonburi Thailand as
participants. The participants pronounced 40 words from each word stress assignment and were
recorded. The pronunciations were checked by a native speaker of English. It was found that
Thai EFL 4th
-6
th grade students produced word stress errors that are mostly in the syntactic
category at41.30% and Thai EFL 4th
-6
th grade students teachers produced a few word stress
errors at5%. The thesis concluded Thai EFL 4th
-6
th grade students produce word stress errors
because they do not understand the syntactic category and the syllable weight. Moreover, the
interference of the students was a reason of the error because the students did not pronounce the
final sound and sounds that do not exist in the Thai language.