A Comparative Analysis of Stress and Intonation Between Indonesian EFL Pre-service Teachers and Native English Speakers

Abstract

This study examines the stress and intonation patterns of Indonesian EFL pre-service teachers through acoustic analysis using PRAAT. Four participants read a standardized passage, The North Wind and the Sun, with their recordings compared to those of four native American English speakers from online corpora. The analysis focused on word stress, sentence stress, and intonation, using selected utterances and target words of pedagogical and prosodic relevance. Intensity, normalized duration, and semitone-based pitch were extracted, with normalization applied for gender and speech rate differences. Findings show that while EFL speakers marked stress on key content words, their prominence cues were less consistent and more limited in range than those of native speakers. Intonation contours were also flatter, suggesting influence from L1 prosody and limited instructional exposure. The results underscore the need for targeted suprasegmental training and highlight Praat’s value in pronunciation research.