An investigation into english intonation patterns performed by students in grade 9 at trung vuong lower secondary school in danang city

THE UNIVERSITY OF DANANG UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDIES PHẠM LÂM NAM PHƯƠNG AN INVESTIGATION INTO ENGLISH INTONATION PATTERNS PERFORMED BY STUDENTS IN GRADE 9 AT TRUNG VUONG LO

THE UNIVERSITY OF DANANG UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDIES

PHẠM LÂM NAM PHƯƠNG

AN INVESTIGATION INTO ENGLISH INTONATION PATTERNS PERFORMED BY STUDENTS IN GRADE 9

AT TRUNG VUONG LOWER SECONDARY SCHOOL

This thesis has been completed at University of Foreign Language

Studies, The University of Da Nang

Supervisor: Ngũ Thiện Hùng, Ph.D

Examiner 1: Dr Trương Bạch Lê

Examiner 2: Assoc Prof Dr Lưu Quý Khương

The thesis was be orally defended at the Examining Committee Time: August 11th, 2022

Venue: University of Foreign Language Studies

- The University of Da Nang

This thesis is available for the purpose of reference at:

- The University of Da Nang – The Center for Learning

Information Resources and Communication

- Center for Information Technology and Learning Resources, University of Foreign Language Studies – The University of Da Nang

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 RATIONALE

In English communication, intonation is a key factor which contributes significantly to the success of conversational interaction

As we may know, intonation, a means to express a tune or melody in the voice, is used to express different shades of meaning, and intonation patterns are the ways speakers adjust the pitch of their voice in order to convey meaning Intonation helps the speaker convey information beyond just the basic meaning of the words This prosodic means can also help the speaker express his/her attitude or feeling about the proposition of the utterance or towards the listener, as well

as distinguish between a statement and a question in the same sentence

In the Vietnamese educational context, English is a compulsory subject in the national education program Thanks to the impact of the communicative approach, teaching objectives have recently turned towards communicative competence that aims at increasing Vietnamese students‟ capacity to communicate in English confidently Therefore, the importance of teaching and learning English pronunciation in general and intonation in particular has been entailed Since 2014, The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has issued the 6-level English Competencies Framework for Vietnam, based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) from A1 to C2 Therefore, many universities and colleges in Vietnam have raised the output standards Students, accordingly, are required to reach the level of C1 in CEFR or the level

5 in the 6-level English Competencies Framework for Vietnam

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Moreover, one of the criteria for evaluating English proficiency is communication competence which focuses on speaking skill Thus, pronunciation is considered an important contribution factor in this skill which is required as one essential component for A2 or level 2 at the lower secondary schools

Along with my own teaching experience at Trung Vuong Lower Secondary School, due to the lack of practice and the disregarding of teaching and learning English intonation, many students often produce incorrect intonation and make their listeners confused in getting the correct message or information when they are involved in conversations

Therefore, with a hope to give English teachers and learners some pragmatic information of students‟ perception and performance

of English intonation patterns as well as to point out common errors of students when performing intonation and major factors leading to these errors to help students overcome their problems and improve their communication skills, I decided to conduct a study with a title

“An Investigation into English Intonation Patterns performed by Students in Grade 9 at Trung Vuong Lower Secondary School in Danang City”

1.2 AIMS, OBJECTIVES AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS 1.2.1 Aims

This study aims to examine how students in Grade 9 at Trung Vuong Lower Secondary School in Danang City experience English intonation patterns in order to provide practical knowledge to the teaching and learning concerning the enhancement of pronunciation of the English intonation patterns

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1.2.2 Objectives

The study intends to fulfil the following objectives:

- To identify common errors and problems that students in Grade 9 at Trung Vuong Lower Secondary School encounter when performing English intonation patterns

- To point out the factors affecting the performance of English intonation patterns of students in Grade 9 at Trung Vuong Lower Secondary School

- To offer some suggestions for the intonation performance of students in Grade 9 at Trung Vuong Lower Secondary School

1.3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

1) What are the common errors and problems that students in Grade 9 at Trung Vuong Lower Secondary School encounter when

performing English intonation patterns?

2) What are the factors affecting the students‟ performance of

intonation patterns?

3) What are the solutions to help students overcome these

possible errors in the performance of English intonation?

1.4 SCOPE OF THE STUDY

This study focuses on the reality of teaching and learning English intonation patterns in Grade 9 at Trung Vuong Lower Secondary School in Danang City However, there is a wide range of aspects of teaching and learning English intonation That is the reason why the area investigated in this research focused on the students‟ perception and their performance of basic English intonation patterns

in typical contexts of conversations in English 9 textbook However, due to the limited size and time strain, subjects of the study concentrated on a limited number of students in Grade 9 at Trung

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Vuong Lower Secondary School in Danang City and data collection was conducted during the period of time from December 2021 to February 2022

1.5 SIGNIFICANCE/ JUSTIFICATION OF THE STUDY

Even though there are a lot of research into the problems as well as difficulties that learners face in learning English intonation patterns, it is surprising that there is not much investigation into the reality of teaching and learning intonation The researcher thinks that essential features for communication such as stress and intonation should be paid attention and they should be a learning process in which learners need practice and guidance to master Thus, it is necessary for both teachers and learners to have an overall understanding about intonation patterns The results of this study are hoped to provide English teachers and learners at Lower Secondary schools, especially in Grade 9, with some pragmatic knowledge and information in order to help them deal with the problems in performing English intonation in classroom activities and in daily communication In addition, with the suggestions given to improve the capability of acquiring pragmatic competence, the study is also used

as a reference for teachers and learners to be more confident in teaching and learning English pronunciation as well as in communicating

1.6 ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Literature Review

Chapter 3: Research Design and Methodology

Chapter 4: Results and Discussion

Chapter 5: Conclusion and Implications

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Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 PRIOR RESEARCH

There have been many studies into English intonation as well as English intonation patterns Binghadeer (2008) examined pitch range

in the production of native and non-native speakers of English, particularly Saudi EFL learners The researcher pointed out that non-native speakers were significantly different from native speakers in the mean of the pitch range for utterances with falling intonation Purnami (2017) analyzed the intonation patterns of students‟ storytelling by analyzing tonality or unit of information, tonicity or focus of information, and tone or status of information using a qualitative method The analysis revealed that different uses of Rise Tone, Fall Tone, Rise-Fall Tone, and Fall-Rise tone can convey different meaning

In terms of English intonation patterns, Le (2008) investigated some basic intonation patterns performed by the Vietnamese learners

at Ben Tre Continuing Center and pointed out some common errors and difficulties that almost learners encounter when communicating in English The findings showed that learners have difficulties in identifying tone units, assigning tonic syllables, selecting tones and failing to perform basic intonation patterns such as Definite statements, Yes-No questions, Exclamation, Wh-questions, Question tags and Echoing questions And in the study of “Intonation Performance of First-year students at College of Foreign Languages – The University of Danang and Suggested Solutions to Improve their Performance of English Intonation”, Tran (2009) highlights some important features of the suprasegmental issue – intonation, indicates

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some difficulties faced by students when performing some basic English intonation as well as their underlying causes Some solutions are also provided in the study to assist students in improving their intonation performance

2.2 BASIC CONCEPTS OF INTONATION

2.2.5 Tone or Pitch Movement

Tench (1996) defines tone as the level and movement of pitch within an intonation unit Pitch movement occurs when the quality of

a speaker's voice changes during the process of communication

2.2.6 Tone Stress and Tonic Syllable

An intonation unit almost always has one peak of stress, also called „tonic stress‟ and the syllable that receive the most stress in an intonation unit is called „tonic syllable‟

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2.2.7 Types of Tones in English

First, English phonetic system is characterized in word stress, sentence stress, rising and falling intonations whereas Vietnamese is considered a tonal language where different words with different tonal inflections will convey different meanings

Second, in English, intonation is the only means to distinguish between different types of sentences; meanwhile, in Vietnamese, intonation is rarely used for this function Instead, certain grammatical patterns are applied to form assertive, negative, and interrogative sentences

2.4 SUMMARY

In this chapter, I have presented some basic concepts of intonation such as the definition of intonation in terms of pitch movement, tonic syllable, types of tones in English and other intonation related figures This chapter also made a sketch of prior research of famous and influential writers of intonation matters and showed an overview about the differences of English and Vietnamese phonetic system concerning the prosodic features

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Chapter 3: RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY 3.1 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHOD

This study is a descriptive and predictive contrastive study using both qualitative and quantitative information

3.2 HYPOTHESES

1 Students‟ failure in performing basic intonation patterns might be due to their insufficient awareness of intonation, including the role and knowledge of the use of intonation in learning and communication, the practice and actual performance of intonation with greater frequency in learning and communication, and the effective selection of appropriate materials and supportive learning aids

2 Students‟ incompetence in English intonation patterns might be attributed in part to the differences of English and Vietnamese phonetic system concerning the prosodic features, the lack of time, learning aid and appropriate learning strategies and even the teacher‟s awareness in teaching intonation and his/her method of teaching intonation

3.3 METHOD AND PROCEDURE

Quantitative and qualitative data collection were done through questionnaires, diagnostic test, interview and direct recording, and they were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed

3.4 SUBJECT SELECTION AND DESCRIPTION

The subjects involved in the research were students in Grade 9

at Trung Vuong Lower Secondary School in Danang City

3.5 THE SAMPLE AND POPULATION

Along with four (4) teachers of English at Trung Vuong Lower Secondary School answering the interviews, there were one hundred

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(100) students participating in the survey with a questionnaire as in the first stage of data collection For the diagnostic test, thirty (30) students who had done the questionnaire were chosen randomly with convenience

3.6 METHOD OF DATA COLLECTION

The data was obtained using 3 measurement instruments : survey with questionnaires, diagnostic test and interviews

The questionnaires were administered to 100 students The researcher made clear all the questions posed to students to get rid of students‟ confusion with the instructions in the questionnaires The students were also allotted some time to make up their mind on the choice of options or to give their feedback to open-ended questions The diagnostic test consisted of 2 parts :

- Part 1 consisted of 2 sections designed for testing the students‟ recognition of basic intonation patterns There were the responses, some sentences and phrases in section 1 in which students were listening to the cassette to choose the correct intonation patterns with different responses Section 2 contained a conversation to test students‟ ability in recognizing the intonation performed by native speakers

- Part 2 were designed to test the students‟ actual performance

on their sound production Section 1 included a sentence list to examine their performance of intonation with different intonation patterns Section 2 contained a sentence list to test their knowledge of communicative functions by choosing an appropriate function for each sentence All the sentences and phrases were collected from English 9 textbook

The interviews included five semi-instructed interview Đại học Đà Nẵng

questions based on the research questions and mainly focused on teachers‟ perceptions and practice in teaching English intonation patterns and their suggestion to enhance the effectiveness of intonation teaching and learning

3.7 DATA COLLECTION

Stage 1: The students were required to speak out the sentences

in the sentence list after being given ten minutes to read through and then complete the checklists

Stage 2: The researcher asked the students to choose the correct intonation patterns in the sentence list after they had ten minutes reading though it and then completing the checklists

Stage 3: The students were required to listen to the CD player and circle the word(s) they had just heard on the materials delivered Stage 4: The students‟ intonation performance of diagnostic test was all tape-recorded The recordings were transcribed, and then were collated with the version produced by native speakers

Stage 5: Teachers teaching English 9 were interviewed with five questions Before answering the researcher‟s questions, the purposes of the interview were explained again to them The interviews were conducted and recorded in Vietnamese

3.8 DATA ANALYSIS

The first part of the survey was done with the aim of eliciting information from the questionnaires about the current situation of the students‟ pronunciation of English intonation patterns at Trung Vuong Lower Secondary School in Danang City

The second part of the survey, diagnostic test, was to gather the information about the students‟ actual performance of pronunciation

in English in terms of production and recognition and production

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There were two parts to be completed in this test:

- The first component of the diagnostic test attempted to detect intonation mistakes in students‟ recognition The qualitative information collected from this part was utilized to explore students‟ knowledge about the tone realization in utterances as well as their meaning in contexts

- For the second part of the test which aimed at detecting students‟ errors when performing basic intonation patterns, students were required to speak loudly given sentences and the recordings collected from this section were used to check the learners‟ actual performance in intonation patterns concerning the degree of their failure in performing intonation patterns in sentences The errors students actually made were concerned in two sides which were how serious the errors were and how comprehensible the utterances were I achieved this task by attentively and carefully listen to students‟ recordings in comparison with the native speaker‟s ones

3.9 VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY

This study was done with the participation of 4 teachers of English and 100 Grade 9 students at Trung Vuong Lower Secondary School in Danang City and 30 of them were randomly chosen to perform their pronunciation perceptive and productive skill without knowing their level in English Another limitation of the study is that the findings cannot be applied to all students in Vietnam in general or

in Danang City in particular In addition, the researcher failed to get information students‟ actual performance in free talks and conversation, which was assumed to provide more reliable empirical evidence for detecting various kinds of pronunciation errors

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