Phonological transfer and targeted instruction in Arab EFL learners’ lexical stress acquisition

Mastering lexical stress is a persistent challenge for second-language (L2) learners, particularly when first-language (L1) prosodic systems differ markedly from the target language. This study investigates how Arabic phonological patterns influence English stress assignment and evaluates the effectiveness of two explicit instructional approaches, ”contrastive phonological analysis” (CPA) and “auditory discrimination training” (ADT), for Arab English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. A total of 180 Jordanian 11th-grade learners completed perception and production tasks involving 50 disyllabic and polysyllabic English words representing five stress types. Acoustic features (pitch, duration, and intensity) were measured using Praat and judged for accuracy by native speakers. Results showed persistent L1 transfer, particularly default penultimate stress and reduced accuracy in morphologically complex forms. Both interventions led to significant improvement in perception and production, with CPA yielding greater gains on stress-ambiguous forms. A strong perception–production correlation ( r = .72, p < .001) confirmed a transfer effect and delayed post-tests showed moderate retention. Findings highlight the role of prosodic transfer and support contrastive, perception-based instruction to improve stress competence among Arab learners.