ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview about what constitutes stress and go on to talk about lexical stress and sentence stress. It provides an extensive overview of recent research on stress patterns found in different varieties of English. Low has given a thorough coverage of what is stress from the research literature and the two main approaches to the treatment of stress: the phonetic treatment and the linguistic or phonological treatment of stress. In discussing the linguistic treatment of stress, it is important to distinguish between word stress and sentence stress. Bolinger established the contrast between accent, stress and vowel quality. In considering EIL pronunciation teaching, there needs to be the understanding that there are two perspectives to consider: first is whether the native speaker can understand the speech of the non-native speaker and equally important is whether the non-native speaker can understand the speech of the native speaker.
