Topic A study on some common pronunciation mistakes of the first years English majored students of the faculty of foreign languages

The research namely “A study on some common pronunciation mistakes of the firstyear English majored students of the Faculty of Foreign Languages in SIU”. As we know that pronunciation is very important in English.It is a key lead to success studying English especially in speaking English. The earlier you focus and master the basics of English pronunciation, the faster you’ll become fluent. Our ear is so important in this process and focusing on clearly hearing and then speaking the sounds of English leads to large gains in fluency later on.This study aimed to investigate some common mistakes in English pronunciation experienced by learners whose first language is Vietnamese and all of them are the firstyear Englishmajored students at SIU. In other words this research also found out the main reason causing these problems, and some techniques for students to improve their pronunciation. The subjects for the study were a hundred English majored students from The Sai Gon International University (SIU), and fiveuniversity teachers of English language from the same university. The instruments used for collecting the data were structured questionnaires. The data collected were analyzed both statistically and descriptively. The thesis includes three chapters: introduction, literature review, research design. In the first chapter, the writer will explain reasons why choosing this study, purposes and significance of study. The second chapter is one of the most important parts which provides the theoretical knowledge and framework of study. It includes (1) mother tongue interference (2) the importance of pronunciation,(3) difficulties in learning pronunciation, (4) methods of learning pronunciation, (5) methods of teaching pronunciation, (6) pronunciation mistakes.In the final chapter, the research methodology introduces participants who were attending SIU, the place where the writer did research.

Hochiminh City – 2017

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THESIS PROPOSAL

Major

English Language

Topic

A study on some common pronunciation

mistakes of the first – years English – majored

students of the faculty of foreign

languages(SIU)

Instructor

Nguyen Thi Kim Chung

Student

Phùng Bích Thúy Vi

ID: 9C661501073

DECLARATION

I am PHUNG BICH THUY VI here by declare that the work presented in this Graduation Thesis

is uniquely prepared by me

I also confirm that, the thesis paper is only prepared for my university requirements not for any other purpose It might not be used with interest of the opposite party of the corporation

Student’s name: Phung Bich Thuy Vi

ID’s student: 9C661501073

Class: 15CTA

Course: 8

Major: English Language

The Saigon International University

Date submitted: 15/7/2019

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all those who helped me overcome all difficulties, thus I can finish my thesis successfully.I would like to thank my classmates for accompanying me to the final years of school to look forward to this graduation thesis

First of all, I would like to sincerely thank to my Supervisor Ms NguyenThi Kim Chung for her useful and constructive suggestions that helped me to finish my graduation thesis successfully She supported me from the beginning to the end with full of her enthusiastic and deep knowledge

in English field

Last but not least I would like to give a big hug and a great thankfulness from the bottom of my heart to The Sai Gon International University as a learning environment where I have chance to study many useful acknowledge and complete my personal awareness during my University life ,

I would like to give the appreciation from the bottom of my heart to The Saigon International University for providing me a professional learning environment and facilities, as well as all teachers in the English Language major for giving enthusiasm and sympathies to lift me to be the better one as I am today

Student: PhùngBíchThúy Vi

ADVISOR’S COMMENTS

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Advisor:………

Signed:………

REVIEWER’S COMMENTS

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Reviewer:………

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TABLE OF CONTENT

CHAPTER I:INTRODUCTION 1

1.1.Rationale 1

1.2 Research goals 2

1.3 Research questions 2

1.4 Scope of the study 2

CHAPTER II:LITERATURE REVIEW/ THEORITICAL FRAMEWORK 3

2.1 DEFINITION OF KEY TERM/CONCEPTS 3

2.1.1: Definition of pronunciation 3

2.1.2: Definition of mistake 4

2.1.3: Definition of stress 4

2.1.4: Definition of Intonation 5

2.1.5: Definition of consonant clusters 6

2.1.6: Definition of phonetic transcription 6

2.2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 6

2.2.1: Mother Tongue Interference 6

2.2.2: The importance of pronunciation 7

2.2.3: Difficulties in learning pronunciation 7

2.2.4: Methods of learning pronunciation 9

2.2.5: Methods of teaching pronunciation 9

2.2.6: Pronunciation mistakes 10

CHAPTER III:RESEARCH DESIGN 12

3.1 RESEARCH SETTING 12

3.2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCH METHODS 12

3.2.1:Methodology 12

3.2.2: Instruments 13

3.3 PARTICIPANTS 15

3.4 PROCEDURES 15

3.5 DATA ANALYSIS 16

CHAPTER IV: FINDING AND DISCUSSION 17

4.1 FINDING 17

4.1.1 Students’ responses to the Survey Questionnaire 17

4.1.2 teachers’ responses to the Survey Questionnaire 27

4.2 DISCSUSSION 30

CHAPTER V:CONCLUSION 32

5.1 CONCLUSION 32

5.2 LIMITATION OF THE STUDY 33

5.3 RECOMMENDATION 33

REFERENCES 36

APPENDICES 39

The research namely “A study on some common pronunciation mistakes of the first-year English majored students of the Faculty of Foreign Languages in SIU” As we know that pronunciation is very important in English.It is a key lead to success studying English especially in speaking English The earlier you focus and master the basics of English pronunciation, the faster you’ll become fluent Our ear is so important in this process and focusing on clearly hearing and then speaking the sounds of English leads to large gains in fluency later on.This study aimed to investigate some common mistakes in English pronunciation experienced by learners whose first language is Vietnamese and all of them are the first-year English-majored students at SIU In other words this research also found out the main reason causing these problems, and some techniques for students to improve their pronunciation The subjects for the study were a hundred English - majored students from The Sai Gon International University (SIU), and fiveuniversity teachers of English language from the same university The instruments used for collecting the data were structured questionnaires The data collected were analyzed both statistically and descriptively The thesis includes three chapters: introduction, literature review, research design

In the first chapter, the writer will explain reasons why choosing this study, purposes and significance of study The second chapter is one of the most important parts which provides the theoretical knowledge and framework of study It includes (1) mother tongue interference (2) the importance of pronunciation,(3) difficulties in learning pronunciation, (4) methods of learning pronunciation, (5) methods of teaching pronunciation, (6) pronunciation mistakes.In the final chapter, the research methodology introduces participants who were attending SIU, the place where the writer did research

Nguyen Thi Kim Chung - MA Graduation Thesis

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 RATIONALE

English has become the universal language of the world English is more and more popular, according to the British Council's research, there are approximately 750 million English as foreign language speakers (EFL) and 375 million English as Second Language speakers (ESL) The importance of English was immediately acknowledged by the Vietnamese government and

as a result the English language programs were made compulsory beginning with the secondary schools and subsequently the high schools and finally university The number of English language center has been remarkable increasing in these years Furthermore, English is an urgent requirement for fresh graduates to get a good job with higher salary or maybe even lead us to many good opportunities but there is a fact that many of them find it difficult to speak English properly to meet this demand

It can be seen that success in language learning is the ability to communicate with others The more the listeners understand what the speaker say, the more success in speaking English the learners get However, there are many students who have been studied English for many years cannot speak English confidently, correctly and fluently There are many problems in pronunciation among Vietnamese students especially freshmen It's no secret that Vietnamese students struggle with English and like many other countries, they faced with some pronunciation problems such us stress, vowels, consonants or final sounds Maybe many of them are focus only

on grammar and vocabulary when they study English at the beginning or study in an unplanned way As a result, their English ability in these two aspects is good, but they are not good at pronunciation.If the speaker has a good pronunciation, the listener will understand more what the speaker says and his intended meaning, whereas, if the speaker pronounces the words incorrectly, the listener will get confused or misunderstand Thus, It is widely recognized that pronunciation plays a significant part in study English Pronunciation is one of the most important factors

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affecting successful communication At the University level, it is very important to improve pronunciation skills for the Freshmen at the beginning to study deeply and completely English If the freshmen have a good pronunciation skills they will be more confident and more interested in studying English

1.2 RESEARCH GOALS

This research was conducted with the aims of:

1 finding out the typical mistakes in pronunciation of the English majored freshmen of Faculty of Foreign Languages in SIU

2 investigating the main reasons causing these problems

3 offering some solutions and suggestions for students to solve pronunciation problem

1.3 RESEARCH QUESTION

With the hope of greeting more comprehensive and specific understanding of English pronunciation, finding out the main pronunciation mistakes faced by the first year students and investigate the main reasons causing these mistakes and giving some techniques to improve their English pronunciation skills my study focuses on:

1 What are the freshmen’ commonpronunciation mistakes?

2 What are the main reasons causing these problems?

3 Whatare the solutions and suggestions for students to improve their pronunciation?

1.4 SCOPE OF THE STUDY

In fact, there are a lot of various techniques to studyEnglish pronunciation, it requires much of time and effort However due to the limitation of time and knowledge of mine, this study only focused on the freshmen of faculty of foreign language at The Sai Gon International University in the second semester of 2018-2019 course

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CHAPTER II

LITERATURE REVIEW/THEORITICAL

FRAMEWORK 2.1 DEFINITION OF KEY TERM/CONCEPTS

2.1.1: Definition of pronunciation

Richard(2002) states that pronunciation as the way certain sounds are produced Pronunciation emphasizes the way sounds are understood by the listeners They continued that pronunciation is

a significant part of English because mispronunciations make it difficult for listeners to understand the meaning of sentences correctly Harmer (2001) defines pronunciation as the way the sounds of a language are made, the way how and where the word stress and sentence stress are placed, and the way how pitch and intonation are used to indicate our feeling and our meaning

Pronunciation is defined as the method of producing the sounds for constructing meaning It consists of consonants and vowels of a language (segments), features of speech such as stress, timing, rhythm, intonation, phrasing (suprasegmental features), and voice quality All of the mentioned elements can work together when speakers speak so that difficulties in one element may affect another and this may make an individual’s pronunciation easy or difficult to understand (PourhoseinGilakjani, 2012; Yates & Zielinski, 2009)

Macmillan (2019) defined “pronunciation” as the way in which a word or a language is spoken This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or language in a specific dialect ("correct pronunciation"), or simply the way a particular individual speaks a word or language A word can be spoken in different ways by various individuals or groups, depending on many factors, such as: the duration of the cultural exposure of their

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childhood, the location of their current residence, speech or voice disorders, their ethnic group, their social class, or their education

PourhoseinGilakjani (2016) pronunciation is the production of sounds that is used for making meaning Pronunciation is the production of a sound system which doesn't interfere with communication either from the speakers’ or the listeners’ viewpoint (Paulston&Burder, 1976) Pronunciation is the way of uttering a word in an accepted manner (Otlowski, 1998) Furthermore, Richard and Schmidt (2002) defined pronunciation as the method of producing certain sounds

2.1.2: Definition of mistake

According to Oxford dictionary (2019) the word “mistake” is defined that mistake is

an error in action, calculation, opinion or judgment caused by poor reasoning, carelessness and insufficient knowledge It is also a misunderstanding or misconception

Cambridge dictionary defines that mistake is an act or a judgement that is misguided or wrong If mistake is used as a verb, it will have a meaning as an action that One make Wrongly identify someone or something

+ The differences between mistake and error

Mistake and error mean something that is done incorrectly or wrong Thus, they are synonyms But the difference between these two words is in the context that they are used in Mistakes are usually accidental You know it’s wrong In other words, mistakes are performance based, and can be self-corrected Mistake is less formal than error, and is usually used in daily speech Errors are usually made due to the lack of knowledge So, the action was wrong because it was different from the rules, model or specific code Error is a more formal word than mistake

2.1.3: Definition of stress

Many teachers advocate starting with stress as the basic building block of pronunciation teaching Stress refers to the prominence given to certain syllables within words, and to certain syllables or words within utterances It is signalled by volume, force, pitch change and syllable length, and is often the place where we notice hand movements and other gestures when we are watching

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someone pronunciation taking One noticeable feature of English is thereduced nature of unstressed syllables Thus, not only are stressed syllables longer, louder, more forceful and at a different pitch, but unstressed ones are often different in quality

Stress is important at three different levels:

• word level – multisyllabic words have one or more syllables that are stressed

• sentence level – the most important words tend to be stressed

• contrastive stress – the most important words carry greater stress

2.1.4: Definition of Intonation

Intonation, or change of pitch, is crucial in signaling speaker meaning, particularly interpersonal attitudes As we saw in the previous section, pitch changes are crucially linked with stress Since intonation patterns are language-specific, learners will need to acquire new ones for English in order to avoid inappropriate transfer from their first language, and thus perhaps inadvertently causing offence There have been three major approaches to intonation theory: the grammatical approach (which relates intonation to grammatical functions), an approach that focuses on the link between intonation and attitude, and the discourse approach (which emphasises speakers and their intentions in longer stretches of discourse)

The way in which intonation works is highly complex, and teachers will not have the time to explore the theory in depth with learners However, there are some simple patterns that can be identified and practiced even for beginner learners The major changes of pitch take place on stressed syllables, particularly on the tonic syllable Five major patterns of tones can be identified: fall, rise, fall-rise, rise-fall and level:

• A falling pattern usually indicates that the speaker has finished, at least temporarily

• A rising intonation signals a question or continuation This difference can signal meaning even

in short exchanges

• A fall-rise tone signals definiteness combined with some qualification; what Yallop (1995) calls

a ‘No, but…’ interpretation Thus, if someone asks if I am busy, and I am suspicious that this is a prelude to asking me to do a job, I may answer ‘No’ but with a fall-rise tone to indicate my mixed feelings