Finance & Accounting Professionals need to communicate in English on a daily basis, and if you work with the US or live and work in the US, it’s important that everyone understand you clearly. It can hurt your credibility, confidence, and ability to do your job if people either misunderstand you or misinterpret what you say. In order to be clear in American English, you’ll want to master the key components of the language.

Now that you have completed the first five courses in this series, you are ready to learn more about word stress and how it impacts your speech in general. You’ll especially want to know more about this so you can increase your vocabulary by using multi-syllabic words with ease.

This course focuses on word stress; that is, how to decide where to stress a word and how to stress a word. You’ll learn what syllables are and what stress-timing is. We’ll then move to some of the guiding principles, learning to distinguish English from French-origin words and determining whether to stress the root of the word or to stress a word based on its ending. We’ll also learn about two versus multi-syllabic words, compound nouns, and phrasal verbs and how they affect word stress. In addition, we’ll look at how vowels shift during word stress, and lastly, we’ll put it all together with some meaningful practice. Depending on your first language, you may struggle to pronounce different words than someone else does, and you’ll need a reliable method to figure this out and create a way to practice on a regular basis so you can enact and sustain real change.

This course also uses finance & accounting vocabulary so that when you learn the concepts of English, you’ll also learn to say the words that come up for you every day at work.

Course Key Concepts: English, pronunciation, pronounce, American, vocabulary, finance words, accounting words, word stress, syllables, sounding out words.

Learning Objectives
  • Identify and determine what a syllable is and how to stress a word.
  • Explore and acquire methods to determine word stress based on the origin of the word and type of word, such as compound nouns, phrasal verbs, or verbs + prepositions, 2-syllable vs. multi-syllabic words.
  • Discover and internalize new patterns to cluster words into thought groups, keeping the last content word long, stressing the correct syllable of the word, and speaking fluidly with breath.
Last updated/reviewed: August 25, 2023

Included In Certifications

This course is included in the following Certification Programs:

8 CoursesFinance & Accounting English For Non-Native Speakers of American English - Certification Program

  1. Finance and Accounting English for Non-Native Speakers: The Vowels of American English
  2. Finance and Accounting English for Non-Native Speakers: Comparative Contrasts in Usage with the Vowels of American English
  3. Finance and Accounting English for Non-Native Speakers: The Consonants in American English
  4. Finance and Accounting English for Non-Native Speakers: Comparative Contrasts in Usage of Consonants in American English
  5. Finance and Accounting English for Non-Native Speakers: Endings on Words in American English
  6. Finance and Accounting English for Non-Native Speakers: Word Stress in American English
  7. Finance and Accounting English for Non-Native Speakers: Intonation & Presence in American English
  8. Finance and Accounting English for Non-Native Speakers: A Crash Course in Finance & Accounting Vocabulary for American English
Prerequisites
Course Complexity: Foundational

No advanced preparation or prerequisites are required for this course.
This course will help to have access to a phonetic / pronunciation dictionary for American English that uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), such as Longman’s Cambridge or Oxford for American English.

Education Provider Information
Company: Illumeo, Inc., 75 East Santa Clara St., Suite 1215, San Jose, CA 95113
Contact: For more information regarding this course, including complaint and cancellation policies, please contact our offices at (408) 400- 3993 or send an e-mail to .
Instructor for this course
Course Syllabus
INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
  Introduction to Word Stress in American English1:37
  How to Speak Like an American8:09
Word Stress – Syllables and Rules
  Word Stress13:18
  Old English Roots and Related Rules16:55
  French and Tonic Endings7:13
  Practice with Words and Sentences6:10
Vowel Shifting with Word Stress
  Vowel Shifts7:09
Conclusion
  Conclusion2:13
CONTINUOUS PLAY
  Finance and Accounting English for Non-Native Speakers: Word Stress in American English1:02:44
SUPPORTING MATERIAL
  Slides: Finance and Accounting English for Non-Native Speakers: Word Stress in American EnglishPDF
  Finance and Accounting English for Non-Native Speakers: Word Stress in American English Glossary/ IndexPDF
  Manual - Finance and Accounting Accent ReductionPDF
REVIEW AND TEST
  REVIEW QUESTIONSquiz
 FINAL EXAMexam