A STUDY ON PRONUNCIATION OF SOME ENGLISH CONSONANTS BY VIETNAMESE LEARNERS

The study aimed at finding out Vietnamese learners’ problems in pronouncing the six sounds basing on their articulatory descriptions, in other words, articulatory phonetics and the cause

Acknowledgement

I am, first of all, particularly indebted to my supervisor, Ms Ha Cam Tam, of the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Vietnam National University, Hanoi for her valuable instructions, criticism, comments, correction and for her kindly encouragement during the development of this Study

I also wish to express my gratitude to the two teachers and also my friends: Imogen from England and Tania from Russia for their assistance on the recordings and especially for their valuable comments and suggestions in the data collection procedures

My appreciation and gratitude are also extended to my students studying at Haiphong Medical University for their enthusiastic help in recording and my colleagues there for their encouragement and support

The last but not the least, I would like to convey my thanks to my family, all my friends and the one I love who encouraged me to take this task and to many others who have assisted All have enabled me to expand my area of expertise and to complete my study

And I would take a full responsibility for this paper, and would appreciate all comments made on it

Haiphong, September 2007,

Dao Thi My Hanh

Abstract

This is a quasi- experimental research on the pronunciation of six English consonants/Τ ∆ Σ Ζ τΣ δΖ/ which are believed to impede Vietnamese learners much from speaking The study aimed at finding out Vietnamese learners’ problems in pronouncing the six sounds basing on their articulatory descriptions, in other words, articulatory phonetics and the causes of the problems The study was conducted by recording the participants’ pronunciation of some certain words and sentences using these word and observing the subjects’ real speech in class After that three different teachers listened to the recordings to note down the problematic sounds made by the subjects of the study in order to figure out their difficulties in articulating these sounds and the causes of these difficulties

From the results, some pedagogical suggestions are offered to improve the English pronunciation of students at Haiphong Medical University

Table of contents

Acknowledgement i

Abstract ii

Table of contents iii

List of tables v

Part 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1 Rationale 1

2 Aims of the study 1

3 Scope of the study 1

4 Methods of the study 2

5 Organization of the study 2

Part 2: DEVELOPMENT 3

Chapter 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 3

1.1 - Phonetics 3

1.2 Articulatory phonetics 4

1.3 Consonants 7

1.3.1 General descriptions of consonants 7

1.3.2 English consonants 7

1.3.2 1 Fricatives /ΤΤΤΤ, ∆∆∆∆/ and / ΖΖΖΖ, ΣΣΣΣ/ 8

1.3.2.2 Affricatives////ττττΣΣΣΣ, δδδδΖΖΖΖ//// 9

1.3.3 Vietnamese consonants 9

1.3.4 English vs Vietnamese 11

1.4 Review of previous research on pronunciation 12

Chapter 2: THE STUDY 14

2.1 Methodology 14

2.1.1 Research questions 14

2.1.2 Data collection instruments 14

2.1.3 Data collection procedures 16

2.1.4 Subjects of the study 17

2.2 Data results 17

2.2.1 Data collected from the recordings 17

2.2.1.1 Mispronunciations across the examiners 18

2.2.1.2 Mispronunciations across subjects 19

2.2.1.3 Mispronunciations across the positions of sounds 20

2.2.1.4 Mispronunciations across the positions of individual sounds 21

2.2.1.5 Mispronunciations across the exercises 24

2.2.1.6 Mispronunciations by deviation types 27

2.2.1.7 Mispronunciations across omission 28

2.2.2- Data collected through class 29

2.3 Discussion 30

Part 3: CONCLUSION 33

1 Major findings 33

2 Implications 34

3 Conclusion 36

4 Suggestions for further study 36

References: 37

Abbreviation

HPMU: Haiphong Medical University

ESP: English for Specific Purpose

ESL: English as Second Language

List of tables

Table 1: Consonants in the English language

Table 2: 21 Consonants in Northern Vietnamese dialect

Table 3: 22 Consonants in Southern Vietnamese dialect

Table 4: Mispronunciations across the examiners

Table 5: Mispronunciations across subjects

Table 6: Mispronunciations across the positions of sound

Table 7: Mispronunciations across the positions of individual sounds

Table 8: Mispronunciations across the exercises

Table 9: Mispronunciations across deviation types

Table 10: Mispronunciations across omission types

Table 11: Mispronunciations classroom interaction

Part 1: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

English, the most popular foreign language in Vietnam, has been taught from the early age (at the age of 8 or even younger) in most of schools and universities throughout the country as a compulsory subject Thus, many Vietnamese, especially the young people, can speak English; however, not many of them "have intelligible English pronunciation so that they can be understood easily in direct communication with foreigners." It is the exact fact happening in Haiphong Medical University (HPMU) while it is widely believed that good communications skills are essential for pharmacy school graduates, an increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse group Wherever their career paths lead, they will be talking with others — patients, physicians and colleagues — about drugs An unintelligible word or a mispronunciation could lead to a dangerous error That leads the author to the thought of making a study on the pronunciation of English consonants that most Vietnamese learners meet difficulties in pronouncing correctly, so as to see how differently they pronounce from that the native speakers do The results of the research can infer some suggestions basing on the reasons of this phenomenon to improve the students' pronunciation in general and of those sounds in particular

2 Aims of the study

This research aims at figuring out if the Vietnamese students under the study have difficulties in pronouncing English consonants and the causes of those difficulties The results will provide insights and assist ESL teachers as they strive to reduce or eliminate problems regarding pronunciation of those consonants as well as raising the awareness of learners during their learning process Therefore, the research focuses on problems that learners of HPMU encounter in pronouncing English consonants

3 Scope of the study

This study, basing on articulatory phonetics, presents several analyses on the pronunciations of the six consonant sounds/∆, Τ, Σ, Ζ, δΖ, τΣ/, which occur in some selected words and sentences used for recording, made by the ten non- English majored students learning in HPMU with a hypothesis that the learners in HPMU produce these

sounds differently from the native speakers in terms of articulation After affirming the truth, some of the subjects' problems in pronouncing those sounds are pointed out with the reasons causing them and suggested solutions for such problems

4 Methods of the study

Since the study attempts to find out if the learners at HPMU have problems in pronouncing the six studied consonants and how different it is in the pronunciation of those sounds between the students at HPMU and native speakers, a combination of different data collection methods were used including recording the participants’ pronunciations of prepared scripts, observing their performance in class and note- taking Details of methodology applied in the study are discussed in part 2, chapter 2

5 Organization of the study

To achieve the aims of the study, this paper is divided into three main parts They are INTRODUCTION, DEVELOPMENT, and CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION includes the reasons of choosing the thesis, the aims, the scope, the methods and the organization of the study

DEVELOPMENT, the most important part of the study, consists of two chapters Chapter 1 is devoted to the presentation of the theoretical background relevant to the research Firstly, some basic concepts of phonetics, articulatory phonetics and consonants are introduced Then the general review of English teaching in HPMU is described Chapter 2 includes methodology applied in the study in which the questions of the research are raised, then the data instruments and the procedures and methodology used for data collection along with detailed descriptions of the participants are presented In this chapter, the results obtained are then analysed to find out the differences in the pronunciation between the native and the subjects'

CONCLUSION contains a summary of the major findings under investigation given along with the concluding remarks established in the study and some suggestions for further study as well as some possible suggestions basing on the origin of the problems to English language teaching as regards pronunciation in general and of the consonants in particular to elementary students at HPMU

Part 2: DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1: LITERATURE REVIEW

In this chapter, the first section provides some basic linguistical and phonetical concepts to bring a common view of the matter studied Then an overview on consonant system in English and Vietnamese is presented in order to give a proof that English has six consonants that are blur and even do not exist in the Vietnamese language Finally, a general review of English teaching generally and English pronunciation teaching in particular at HPMU is offered to see what happened to students' competence of English

1.1 - Phonetics

This section starts with a distinction between the two related terms (often loosely) used to refer to linguistic disciplines studying the linguistic sign which de Saussure called the acoustic image: phonetics and phonology

While phonetics deals with how speech sounds are actually produced, transmitted and received in actual spoken language, phonology deals specifically with the ways those sounds are organized into the individual languages, hence dealing with abstractions on a virtual basis

Here see two useful definitions for phonetics and phonology:

"Phonology deals with the speakers' knowledge of the sound system of a language It

is therefore exclusively concerned with langue or competence [ ] Phonology can be divided into two branches: (1) segmental phonology and (2) suprasegmental phonology" (Skandera & Burleigh, 2005:5)

"Phonetics first of all divides, or segments, concrete utterances into individual speech sounds It is therefore exclusively concerned with parole or performance Phonetics can then be divided into three distinct phases: (1) articulatory phonetics, (2) acoustic phonetics, and (3) auditory phonetics" (Skandera & Burleigh, 2005:3)

Phonetics will be almost unanimously acknowledged to be the linguistic science, which studies speech sounds: the way in which they are produced (uttered, articulated), the way in which they are perceived, their physical characteristics, etc Therefore, it is these more “palpable”, measurable aspects of the phonic aspects of language that constitute the domain of phonetics (Katamba, 1996)

Phonetics is concerned with various aspects relevant for the physical characteristics of sounds Several branches of phonetics can further be distinguished, depending on the narrower domain of interest of the respective field Thus, one of the most important branches of phonetics is articulatory phonetics which studies the way in which human beings articulate or utter the sounds they make use of in verbal communication Another branch of phonetics that studies the physical parameters of speech sounds is called acoustic phonetics It is the most “technical” of all disciplines that are concerned with the study of verbal communication And the last branch is auditory phonetics which studies the way people perceive speech sounds

However, the research takes the Vietnamese learners' problems of pronouncing six English consonants into considerations regarding to the way they use their organs of articulations pronouncing such sounds This is also what articulatory phonetics study and the theoretical background of it is presented with more details in the following section

1.2 Articulatory phonetics

Articulatory phonetics, one of the three main branches of phonetics, is the study of the organs of speech and their use in producing speech sounds The term 'organs of speech' refers to those parts of the human body that are concerned in various ways with the production of speech A lot of them are only secondarily concerned with the production of speech – their primary functions have to do with eating, chewing, and swallowing food, and respiration Those parts of the body below (not the lungs) belong to the vocal tract The vocal tract is divided into the supraglottal and the subglottal tract (as shown in Picture 1)

Pic 1: Articulators Articulatory phonetics deals with the major aspects of speech production They are the air stream mechanism, the state of vocal cords, the state of velum, the place and the manner of articulation (Davenport & Hannahs, 1998) On the other hand, this study is paid attention to consonants, particularly the six studied ones, therefore, the manner and the place of articulation and voicing, the three main features of consonants, are discussed with more interest, as followed

Clark and Yallop use two features to describe the manner of articulation of consonants: constriction and articulation The degree of constriction decreases from total closure via partial constriction to a fully open vowel like manner Articulation divides into dynamic and stable Altogether, there are seven recognized manners of articulation: stop, fricative, approximant, nasal, flap, tap and trill

The manners of articulation are described as followed:

Stop a complete closure at any point in the vocal tract and sudden release of

the closure

Fricative potentially stable articulation produced by a constriction in the vocal

tract that is narrow enough to create a turbulent airflow

Approximant

potentially stable articulation in which the constriction is normally greater than in a vowel but not great enough to produce turbulence at the point of constriction

Nasal stoppage at some point in the oral cavity, velum is lowered to allow

airflow through the nasal cavity, stable articulation

Tap

dynamic articulation where there is a brief occlusion in the vocal tract, a single deliberate movement to create a closure, equivalent to a very short stop

Flap

dynamic articulation where there is a brief occlusion in the vocal tract, one articulator strikes the other in passing not so much to create a brief closure but more as the incidental effect of the articulatory gesture

Trill a dynamic articulation produced by the vibration of any articulator, a

series of vibrations

The place of articulation defines both the area of the oral-pharyngeal vocal tract where the constriction is made and the part of the tongue used to form the constriction This gives

us the following places of articulation, which is shown clearly in the picture 2

• bilabial: the two lips

• dental: the tongue tip or (usually) the tongue blade with the upper teeth

• alveolar: the tongue blade or (usually) the tongue tip with the alveolar ridge

• palatal: the tongue body and the hard palate

• velar: the tongue body and the soft palate

• uvular: between the back of the tongue and the uvula (which hangs down in the back of the mouth)

• pharyngeal: between the root of the tongue and the back of the throat (the pharynx)

• glottal: This isn't strictly a place of articulation Glottal sounds are made in the larynx

(Davenport & Hannahs, 1998)

Voicing is also one the main categories that consonants have to base on when being described The vocal folds may be held against each other at just the right tension so that the air flowing past them from the lungs will cause them to vibrate against each other This process is called voicing Sounds that are made with vocal fold vibration are said to be voiced Sounds made without vocal fold vibration are said to be voiceless There are

several pairs of sounds in English which differ only in voicing that is, the two sounds have identical places and manners of articulation, but one has vocal fold vibration and the other doesn't The six chosen consonants are such exact examples in pairs, /Τ, ∆/; /Σ, Ζ/; /τΣ, δΖ/

1.3 Consonants

1.3.1 General descriptions of consonants

From a phonetic point of view, consonants are articulated in one of two ways: either there is a closing movement of one of the vocal organs, forming such a narrow constriction that it is possible to hear the sound of the air passing through; or the closing movement is complete, giving a total blockage The closing movement may involve lips, tongue, or throat, but in each case the overall effect is very different from the relatively open and unimpeded articulation found in vowels (Crystal, 2003) In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by a closure or stricture of the vocal tract sufficient to cause audible turbulence.*

Consonants, actually, are sounds made with closed or nearly closed articulations As a consequence, they tend to break up the stream up speech, defining a perceptual and articulatory edge, or margin, for a unit (word or syllable in a word) that includes one or more vowels

Consonants can be divided into different kinds in accordance with three categories, i.e., the degree of vocal cord vibration, the place of articulation and the manner of articulation

bilabial labiodental dental alveolar postalveolar retroflex palatal velar glottal

Table 1- Consonants in the English language

A stop cuts off airflow through either the mouth or the nose so there are oral and nasal stops Oral stops are often called plosives: [p, b], [t, d], [k,γ] Nasal stops are usually called nasals: [m], [n] and [Ν] English fricatives include [f, v], [Τ, ∆], [s, z], [Σ, Ζ] and [h] English approximants include [j], [w], [ ], and [l] Affricates can be seen as a sequence of

a stop and a fricative which have the same or similar places of articulation, and there are only two affricative sounds in English [τΣ], [δΖ]

The studied consonants can be called in different terms: fricatives/ affricatives if basing on the manner of articulation; dental sounds/Τ, ∆/, post- (palato) alveolar sounds/Σ,

Ζ, τΣ, δΖ/ if basing on the place of articulation /Σ, Τ, τΣ/ are strong and long fiction sounds, the others are weak and short ones They are similar at this point but different at another point due to their own characteristics in the language, thus, it is much easier when

we take them into consideration in pairs, that is, /Τ, ∆/; /Σ, Ζ/; /τΣ, δΖ/

1.3.2 1 Fricatives /Τ, ∆/ and / Ζ, Σ/

According to the manner of articulation, Katamba (1996) describes FRICATIVE: the articulators are brought very close together leaving only a very narrow channel through which the air squeezes on its way out, producing turbulence in the process, such as / f, v, Τ,

∆, Ζ, Σ/

Then Kelly (2000) provided the detailed descriptions of consonants in his books including dental sounds /Τ, ∆/ (as in think, the, bath, bathe, mathematics, father) "The tongue tip makes light contact with the back of the top, front teeth Or, tongue tip may

protrude between upper and lower teeth The soft palate is raised /Τ/is unvoiced and fortis /∆/ is voiced and lenis /∆/ is devoiced at the end of a word."

Also, he wrote "/Σ, Ζ/ (as in she, fish, beige, nation, measure) are post- alveolar sounds But when pronouncing them, the tongue blade makes light contact with the alveolar ridge, and the front of the tongue is raised /Σ/ is unvoiced and fortis /Ζ/ is voiced and lenis It also devoiced at the end of a word /Ζ/ does not occur as an initial sound in English, and is rare as a final sound."

1.3.2.2 Affricatives/τΣ, δΖ/

And Cruttenden (2001) gives the description of AFFRICATIVE: a complete closure at some point in the mouth, behind which the air pressure builds up; the separation of the organs is slow compared with that of a plosive, so that more extended friction is a characteristic second element of the sound English has only two affricatives, the voiceless palato-alveolar /τΣ/ and its voiced counterpart /δΖ/

/τΣ, δΖ/ (as in church, judge, nature, larger) are also palato- alveolar sounds The tongue tip, blade and rims close against the alveolar ridge and side teeth The front of the tongue is raised, and when the air is released, there is audible friction The soft palate is also raised /τΣ/ is unvoiced and fortis /δΖ/ is voiced and lenis /δΖ/ is devoiced at the end

of a word

1.3.3 Vietnamese consonants

In the Vietnamese language, according to Wikipedia*, there are 21 consonants of Hanoi variety (Northern Vietnamese) and 22 of Saigon variety (Southern Vietnamese), but they are all called initial consonants (Mai Ngoc Chu, 1997) as shown in the table below Note: Consonant sounds from both northern and southern dialects of Vietnamese are based on Nguyen Dinh Hoa (2001) Sounds are represented by IPA symbols

*

a free encyclopedia on the Internet

Table 2 21 Consonants in Northern Vietnamese dialect

Table 3 22 Consonants in Southern Vietnamese dialect The Southern Vietnamese variety is essentially the same as the Northern with some exceptions including regional consonants variation, for example, at the beginning of syllables, Northern /v, z/ appear as Southern /j/; Southern /r/ appears as Northern /z/, Southern /c, ♣/ appear as Northern /c/, and Southern /s, ♣/ appear as Northern /s/

And note that Northern Vietnamese dialect contains twenty-one consonantal phonemes Of these, nineteen can occur word-initially (although one of these, [p], occurs only in foreign loans), and just eight are permitted word-finally: [m n Ν p t k j w] The plosive sequence [p t k] are unreleased in all syllabic contexts (Kirby, 2005)

1.3.4 English vs Vietnamese

It is easy to infer from Table 1-3 that there are more similarities than differences in the manner and the place of articulation of the consonants in the two languages For instances, both of the languages share the place and manner in articulating many consonants, such as /p, b, m, w / (bilabial- stop, nasal, approximant), /k, Ν/ (velar- stop, nasal), /f, v/ (labiodental- fricative), /j/ (palatal- approximant), /n, l/ (alveolar- nasal, lateral approximant), /s, z/ (alveolar- fricative) and /h/ (glottal- fricative)

And it is certain that in the two phonological systems there are foreign sounds to each other, which make them different languages Typically, in Vietnamese, the dental aspirated sound /τ°Η/ is in letters ‘th’ the same way as the dental, fricative English sounds /Τ, ∆/ look in words However, they are different in the manner of articulation, that is, the former

is stop, and the latter is fricatives, which creates problems for both in trying to learn each other’s language Another typical example of the sounds in both languages, which make most of Vietnamese learners confused in articulating them They are the affricative / ♣/ and fricative /♣/ in Southern Vietnamese, which are supposed to teach as the national model language from the very beginning of a child’s school- life, and the English affricative /τΣ/ and fricative /Σ/ They seem to sound similar due to the same manner of articulation, but they are different in the place of articulation, that is, the former are retroflex and the latter are post alveolar Besides confusing sounds, the two languages also have the sounds that the other completely does not have in terms of either the place or the manner of articulation, for example, the velar fricative /Φ/, the palatal nasal / /, the palatal stop /c/, the glottal stop / / in Vietnamese, and the post alveolar fricative /Ζ/ and affricative /δΖ/ in English, etc

Research shows that English consonants which have different either place or manner

of articulation from Vietnamese seem to be often mispronounced by Vietnamese learners Six out of them are/Τ, ∆, Σ, Ζ, τΣ, δΖ/, which are the objects of the study and discussed earlier

Five out of the six chosen consonants do not exist in the Vietnamese language, i.e / /, /ð/, / /, /Ζ/ and / / except for /Σ/ in Central and Southern dialects1

, thus it is understandable that the subjects mispronounce them most of the time when they speak 1.4 Review of previous research on pronunciation

Indeed, there are several studies on Vietnamese learners’ problems or difficulties in any aspects of English pronunciation including some relating to English consonants For example, “Difficulties for Vietnamese when pronouncing English: Final Consonants” by Nguyen, Thi Thu Thao (2007)2 proved that English word-final consonants are not pronounced in a native-like way by Vietnamese speakers And Vietnamese effort to pronounce English word-final consonants is towards omitting, adding schwa or replacing

by sounds closer to those existing in their mother-tongue "Teaching English to Speakers of Vietnamese Refugee Education Guide: General Information"2that highlights problems Vietnamese speakers are likely to have in learning English and suggests ways of helping Vietnamese students of English over difficulties caused by these differences Or 9 Essential English Pronunciations in the Vietnamese Context4 found that English sounds not found in Vietnamese, for example, the interdentals /δ/, /θ/, can be mixed up with /f/ or Vietnamese /th/ though this may not influence comprehensibility Another finding of this study is that Vietnamese students often neglect these and constant exercises on final endings should be done attentively during any course

Recently, an article named Common pronunciation problems of Vietnamese learners

of English, by Ha Cam Tam (2005) also pointed out the two main problems in pronunciation of Vietnamese learners, that is, sound omission and sound confusion However, many previous studies found in books, linguistic magazines or on the Internet are only about general pronunciation problems of wide issues, none of them specifies in certain consonants that most impede Vietnamese learners from communication Also for

4

by Tran Thi Lan, PhD Senior Lecturer, Hanoi University of Foreign Studies

http://www.britishcouncil.org/9_essential_english_pronunciation_in_the_vietnamese_context.doc

this reason, the research is carried out to find out the fact from a perceptible phenomenon recognized by the author during her teaching process in HPMU, that is to say, the students studying in HPMU cannot pronounce/∆, Τ, Σ, Ζ, δΖ, τΣ/ the same way as native speakers

do

Chapter 2: THE STUDY

So far the literature review has presented the basic theory of phonetics, articulatory phonetics, consonants and the relevant matters They are the background supporting this main part of the study, which consist of the methodology and data analysis The former presents the research questions, the data instruments with the methodology, the data collection procedure and the subjects of the study And the latter provides the results getting from the collected data and the discussion of those results at the same time From that the study can come to an implication to conclude what have been raised from the start

2.1 Methodology

2.1.1 Research questions

The study focuses on analyzing the pronunciation of Vietnamese learners; in this study these were students in HPMU, on the six English consonants that do not exist in the Vietnamese language Therefore, the study is set up to the followings questions:

• Do the subjects have problems in pronouncing these consonants?

• How do they differ from native speakers in articulating these sounds?

• What are the causes of the mispronunciations?

The answers of these research questions are the aims that this study goes for

2.1.2 Data collection instruments

In order to get the sound samples, the author chose some suitable scripts from a certain book and got the students to read out loud The scripts have two parts: the first one made

up by single words containing the chosen consonants, in fact, is pronunciation exercises read separately by native speakers That was extracted from certain tape scripts at scattered pages in a book namely English File 1 published by Oxford University Press in 2003

The reason for taking this exercise as the data instrument is that the book is designed with pronunciation exercises of all English phonemes including the six selected consonants

of the study, which cannot be found in the course book Headway Elementary that the subjects are being taught at university Those exercises were found to be relevant and also

to meet the demand of the subjects' English level because the book was designed for 'beginners and false beginners' as it said The purpose of this exercise is to get how the

subjects pronounce such six consonants in isolate words comparing with the way native speakers do it The followings are the words chosen from the book to use as data collection instrument for the study:

(English File 1, cited at page 70) (English File 1, cited at page 79)

These words chosen contain the six studied sounds in three positions: initial, internal and final in order to capture as full picture of the subjects’ mispronunciation of these sounds as possible

In addition, with the purpose of finding out if the subjects have the similar problems with those sounds in connected speech in terms of pronunciation, the author made six simple sentences using some of the words in the first exercise These sentences are the followings:

2.1.3 Data collection procedures

The data collection was conducted followings three steps discussed below

Firstly, the respondents were asked to read out aloud the prepared scripts as mentioned

in the earlier section What they read was recorded directly into the computer then analyzed in the light of phonetics, particularly articulatory phonetics to find out the differences in the subjects' pronunciation compared with the native's one

Secondly, with the help of the two foreign teachers of English, one comes from Russia and the other comes from England, the ten- recorded samples were listened to list out the problems in students' pronunciation Asking for the assistance of a Russian teacher whose professional is English teaching is for the reason that the Russian teacher may have a more objective point of view in finding out the subjects' mispronunciations when listening to their recordings than the researcher herself because though she is also a non-native speaker like the author; besides, she has no Vietnamese background and has never listened to the students before hence she has no easy- understanding emotional state like the researcher Without being shown the origin of what was recorded beforehand, the two teachers were asked to note down whatever they heard while they were listening to and what they thought to be problematic with the pronunciation At the same time, the recordings were listened and noted down by the researcher in order to find out an independent result from her two colleagues’

Finally, the researcher observed the subjects’ real speech in class during her teaching time to see if the subjects’ pronunciations in real performances were similar with that in recordings From the data collected how much the subjects mispronounced such consonants and what the mispronunciations were like were pointed out

1 I like drinking orange juice

2 I usually watch television in my free time

3 I often go shopping with my mother

4 We go to the theatre every Thursday

5 She has a shower everyday

6 We sometimes play chess before lunch

2.1.4 Subjects of the study

Since the study applies the technique of recording, the subjects involved are ten non- English majored freshmen and sophomores aged 18 to 20 years old including 6 females and 4 males All the students in HPMU were taught English in the course book namely Headway Elementary in the first year And at the time of the study, in terms of English proficiency, all the subjects have generally covered basic grammatical categories and developed basic skills in reading, speaking, listening and writing at the level of elementary They are learning to become general practitioners at HPMU and they were chosen incidentally All of them are from different areas in the North, i.e Quangninh (Halong city), Haiphong, Haiduong, Hung yen, Hanoi (the suburbs), Bacninh, Phutho It is certain that they were given the common education from the very start of their life because the places they are from are generally at the similar level of development Moreover, they are,

on the whole, intelligent and hardworking students, because getting into a medical school

is not easy work

In short, the subjects of the study are compatible in terms of age, sex, and knowledge

of both the mother tongue and foreign language Therefore, it can be said that the scripts used to record are suitable and obviously at their level of English competence

2.2.1 Data collected from the recordings

After investigating, the subjects' pronunciation problems relating to the six consonants are found:

1 /Τ/ is usually pronounced like /th/ in Vietnamese (described by the native teacher as soft /t/ sound) or even /t/ and is not pronounced at the final position

2 /∆/ is pronounced like /th/ in Vietnamese or /s/, and /d/ in the final position

3 /Σ/ is pronounced like /s/ and is omitted at the final position