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. Field of Study: Specialized Knowledge