Teaching english pronuciation (only voiced and voiceless sounds) for 11th grade students at nguyen khuyen high school graduation paper

HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ---o0o--- DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES GRADUATION PAPER May 11 th , 2019 TEACHING ENGLISH PHONOLOGY ONLY

HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

-o0o - DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

GRADUATION PAPER

May 11 th , 2019

TEACHING ENGLISH PHONOLOGY (ONLY VOICED AND

NGUYEN KHUYEN HIGH SCHOOL

Instructor: M.A Võ Ngọc Hân Student: Lâm Mỹ Miều

School ID No.: 15DH710426 Class: SA1502

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were big

things”

 Kurt Vonnegut

This is to express my special thanks to the Department of Foreign

Languages of Ho Chi Minh City University of Foreign Languages – Information Technology (HUFLIT) as well as my wonderful teacher - Vo Ngoc Han who enabled me to grant the golden opportunity to carry this project on the

topic (Teaching English phonology (only voiced and voiceless sounds) for 11th

grade students at Nguyen Khuyen high school) It is her that provided me with all the necessary facilities for the research On top of that, her exemplary character, constant encouragement, and careful monitoring, valuable feedbacks throughout the research are so great that even saying my deepest appreciation is never enough I

also had great pleasure working with Ms Vo Thu Thuy, my English internship

mentor at Nguyen Khuyen high school She is someone who was instrumental in guiding English teaching for me Thanks should also go to the two classes: 11L1 and 11B3, where I had time to work with during my memorable internship I feel very lucky to be able to work with them I will never forget those days of mine at Nguyen Khuyen high school In addition, I would like to recognize the great support

that I received from my university friends, my parents, and my little sister They

provided me with encouragement and patience throughout the duration of this project by cheering me up I very much appreciate them for helping me a lot in gathering different information, strengthening my willpower from time to time in making this project, even though I want to give up

Table of Contents

ABSTRACT 4

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 5

1.1 Personal background 5

1.2 Purpose of the study 5

1.3 Research questions 6

1.4 Contribution to knowledge 6

1.5 Structure of the report 6

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 7

2.1 The Importance of Phonetics and Phonology in the Teaching of Pronunciation 9

2.1.1 Phonetics Importance 9

2.1.2 Phonology Importance 11

2.2 Vietnamese 11th grade pupils’ difficulties in learning English phonology in textbook 12

2.3 Vietnamese students’ viewpoint on learning pronunciation 15

CHAPTER 3: METHOD 17

3.1 Setting 17

3.2 Participants 17

3.3 Data collection/ Method 17

3.4 Data statistic 18

CHAPTER 4: RESULTS 19

4.1 Results of questionnaire 20

4.1.1 Background information 20

4.1.2 Perception of phonology instruction and acquisition 22

4.2 Results of interview 26

CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION 28

5.1 Discussions 28

5.2 Limitations 28

5.3 Recommendations for further study 29

References 30

Appendix A 34

Appendix B 40

Appendix C 42

Appendix D 44

ABSTRACT

In accordance with a number of studies on English pronunciation for Vietnamese people, many drawbacks are mentioned There are so many problems to list out like their mother language, their home country, and a lack of knowledge about English phonetics, etc Among those, this paper will give a close look on the topic of Teaching phonology experienced by high school students An aim of my experiment was to determine if the learning pronunciation in English textbook through phonetics teaching of Nguyen Khuyen High School’s students would be good or bad Total 90 participants who met criterion conducted the study through either in questionnaires or in interviews Findings indicated that the curiosity for phonetics of both genders was explainable An important factor in designing the survey was the majority of female participants showed significantly intellectual better understanding of phonetics than male participants A sensitive analysis is only related to one high school, and maybe it is not generalized to other high schools in Ho Chi Minh City or even in Vietnam The results of the modeling and sensitivity analysis are presented, so they can be used as an aid to the design of considerable research for those who are interested in the topic

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Personal background

By the time cultural meetings and tourism development have been accomplished, English still places the most common superior language all over the world for non-native speakers In Vietnam, when it comes to teaching English pronunciation for high school students, it is clearly a pain in the head for many ESL teachers (refers to the teaching of English as a foreign language) To broaden this view, phonetics is highly supported to teach beginners starting to speak English from zero

English phonetics, basic human speech sounds, plays an essential part in real-life contexts due to the reflection of speakers’ gender identities and the nations where they live in (Seidlhofer, 2001) Having a better concept of phonetics enables learners acquire academic achievements and gets accessible to be promoted at work Although the Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training publicized a proposal in

2008 that turning foreign languages into a strong point for Vietnamese young generation was beyond priority However, this recommendation is still a hard test for educators to figure out the solutions Another suggested solution noted from Nguyen Xuan Thanh, Deputy Director General of Secondary Education Department, shared that a ten-year scaffolding English learning program (grade 3 to 12) was built to provide phonetics, pronunciation as well as four basic skills for learners Sadly, Shak, Lee and Stephen (2016) pointed out a series of difficulties in Vietnamese students’ pronunciation of English

1.2 Purpose of the study

The primary purpose of this study was to ascertain the effects of learning phonetics of Nguyen Khuyen High School’s students This mini – research was also conducted to determine how many Nguyen Khuyen High School’s students favor or even ignore to this section

1.5 Structure of the report

The study commences with an introduction about phonetics effects on students and this paper is broaden in the following chapter by a detailed analysis of mistaken learning reasons which is the cornerstone of its issue After outlining the research findings and discussions, the study suggests ways of teaching and testing phonetics effectively in the final chapter

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

When it comes to teaching Language Focus (LF) at high schools, many English as a Second Language teachers (ESL teachers) complain that the amount of time spent on designing one English lesson is not enough to transmit a full content

to students as planned This scenario caused a lack of homogeneity due to the fact that LF includes two parts: pronunciation and grammar In an attempt to catch up with a 45–minute-long lecture, some of them usually focus on instructing the grammar section in a careful method for taking tests Or else, they deliver the lesson either the former or the later in a hurry which makes learners hard to understand the main objectives of the lesson

As has been mentioned above, the schools and ESL teachers put little emphasis on oral interaction in different communicative contexts, typically pronunciation–teaching phonology of sounds in LF In the article of Tuoi Tre News

Online: “7 years at high school: Why unable to speak English?” posted on 12

October, 2006 strongly emphasized high school students’ fear of speaking English, and even pointed out a shocking data of three-fourths (86.8%) of Vietnamese high school students are not able to have English communication skills The situational irony is, after over a decade, Saigoneer published its article on Saturday, 06 January,

2018 in an online website headlined: “After 10 Years, Vietnam's National English

Project Still Struggles to Produce Results” to show discredit on foreign education

teaching plan as something “unpopular among schoolgoers”

This issue literally reveals a sorrowful reflection of language education in Vietnam not only in teaching English but also in teaching other foreign languages as

a whole In the fields of language education, communicative approach became a buzzword among educators With this method of teaching oriented syllabus, it is hoped that students will make good use of oral communication However, Tam’s research in January 2006 proved that the expectation is unsatisfied in comparison to the reality since learners have been noticed with serious pronunciation errors

leading failure to communicate The prominent problem lies in the fact that traditional way of teaching English is still static and unchangeable, making students stay inactive and demotivated in a test-taking environment rather than a communication environment In terms of English pronunciation teaching, it is hypothesized that there will be some limitations to be improved by time In addition,

in Tam’s research also cited from a book “On Tesol `80 Building Bridges: Research

and Practice” written by Janet C Fisher Relating to an accurate fluency criterion,

the mistake which might seriously weaken the progress of communication in ESL learners is communication, rather than grammar or vocabulary It is argued that

pronunciation is vital in developing the learners’ capabilities

According to Davenport and Hannahs (1998) stated that there are various ways for people to produce sounds Therefore, sound is best described to use as “a part of code of a particular language” From this point of view, pronunciation is seen as “the production and reception of sounds of speech” Thus, sound is meaningful because of its meaning usage in contexts Here, the code is linked with other elements to result in communication achievably Meanwhile, if Vietnamese learners’ needs and attitudes towards learning English pronunciation are taking into account then the participants’ motivation and perspectives must be weighed and examined It is suggested to be a means to help Vietnamese teachers and educators decide that are the appropriate teaching technique for the Vietnamese learners of English Therefore, this question arises: a) What is the importance of phonetics of high school students? b) How do students feel about studying phonetics in textbooks? c) What phonetics activities students enjoy when they get involved in phonetics teaching? Once these questions are answered, there are many solutions being available to the problem

2.1 The Importance of Phonetics and Phonology in the Teaching of Pronunciation

“Knowing a language includes knowing the sounds of that language”

 Unknown 

2.1.1 Phonetics Importance

In the previous decades, figuring out the most satisfactory methodology of teaching the sounds of the foreign language is a nerve–racking for a number of ESL teachers One of the best approaches to the concern that has been recommended is the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) Trask’s (1996) dictionary showed that the IPA targets to visualize “distinctive symbols for all speech sounds which are phonologically distinct in any language” Related to this advancement, many versions of the IPA have been created and applied to be appeared in textbooks for teaching pronunciation (e.g O’Connor (1967))

In the article “The Importance of Phonetics and Phonology in the Teaching

of Pronunciation” posted on 09 June 2016, Abdessamad Saidi said that phonetics

has made a fresh start to the teaching of pronunciation With “the study of the physical properties of sounds and their place and manner of articulation in the vocal tract” (Broughton et al (1980: 50)), phonetics builds a teaching aid of dynamic importance used in pronunciation’s teaching An example to prove is that in illustrative notes of the English sound system, linguists categorize speech sounds into consonants and vowels As stated in Haycraft (1978), the former are illustrated

to rely on “the movements of the mouth during the articulation (bilabial, dental, alveolar, palatal, velar)” or rely on “the nature of the airstream, the place and movement of the tongue, and also either the voice is used or not (voiced, voiceless, plosive, affricate, fricative, nasal, lateral)” On the contrary, vowels are primarily labeled in the definition of “the position of the tongue and lip rounding” These element explanations are unseen to be “arbitrary” in the view of pronunciation’s teaching Haycraft (1978: 58) pointed out: “Awareness of this is useful as many mistakes made by learners are due to slight differences in sound production”

UNITIPA International Phonetic Alphabet (revised to 2018)

2.1.2 Phonology Importance

A recent book written by Phonology Richards & Schmidt (2010: 433) involved phonology definition It is “the study or description of the distinctive sound units (phonemes) of a language and their relationship to one another” One problem with this term is that it concerns to differentiate “how phonemes and their allophones operate in different phonological systems” In the past, the phonology’s research has observed a model change in the presentation of the smallest units of phonological analysis In addition, the model change creates two views in the name

of distinctive - feature analysis and structural analysis

The central idea behind distinctive feature theory is “a feature of the sound system of a language that serves as the crucial distinguishing mark between two phonemes, as the distinctive feature of voicing”, following Dictionary.com To easily understand this statement, ELLO (English Language and Linguistics Online),

if two sounds are different, they cause “a distinction in meaning” Once a feature contrasts one phoneme to another, it is called a distinctive feature This difference also results in the meaning difference This site also gives an example to clear its opinion:

seal vs zeal

What we can mark the differences between [s] and [z] are the distinctive

feature [voiced] sounds because [s] and [z] are two contrasting phonemes Moreover, they are unable to be used either allophones or complementary distributions Also, it is easy to notice them due to the distinguishable traits [voicing] According to their characteristics, the sounds of the language can be assembled into groups

Meanwhile, structural analysis is the process of making use of phonemes which uses “familiar word parts (base words, prefixes, and suffixes) to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words” (“lessonsense.com”, 2016) It is able to be introduced to students to recognize the basic sound – letter relationships Therefore, the form is built by the structure of prefixes + root + suffixes

Example 1: un+know+able, un+stop+able, un+control+able (same prefix,

same suffix)

Example 2: view, view+ing, re+view, re+view+ing, pre+view, pre+view+ed

Example 3: liv+able, mov+ing, un+believ+able, pre+packag+ing

2.2 Vietnamese 11 th grade pupils’ difficulties in learning English phonology in textbook

There are 4 sounds introduced to the lesson: /pt/, /bd/, /ps/, /bz/ in Part E: Language Focus (Pronunciation), English 11 (Basic) - page 151 From that introduction, the objective of the task is to let students understand how to produce each sound appropriately On the other hand, when preparing a lesson plan, the difficulty of teaching pronunciation is unavoidable

One of the apparent barriers that students usually overcome is “English final consonant sound” Tran (2005) shared his thoughts that: “Vietnamese phonology seems more complicated than English, but in the long run, this system becomes simpler and acquisitive than English” He also commented: “it may take a non–native speaker of Vietnamese two months to learn Vietnamese phonology profoundly, and then he will surely be able to pronounce any Vietnamese word; whilst British or American people during their whole life have to learn how to pronounce new words continuously with a lot of support from dictionaries” (cited in Thao’s translation, 2007) Having a sufficient input, typically the speaker’s tones, Vietnamese learners are seen to be too confident to acquire phonetically In fact, the hypothesis above is not right because of this studying manner That’s why, Vietnamese native speakers have to cope with number of difficulties to learn foreign languages which are the same and easy as their language to some extent, for example, Russian, French, English or Spanish

Surprisingly, there have been a large number of investigations on Vietnamese’s difficulties in pronouncing English consonants and cluster These

have given unexpected results, which become a precious material for advanced studies, especially, for this paper

Based on Ha’s information, (2005: 35 - 46) after investigating her findings jumped to the conclusion on the left, in comparison with the table formed by Center for Applied Linguistics (Neumann, 2007) Through Ha’s research, only the Northern people have the problem with the confusion between /s/ and /ʃ/, /t / and /tʃ/, /ʒ/ and /z/ Those units, which appeared in the table by Center for Applied Linguistics (Neumann, 2007), are relevant for each Vietnamese learners as it contains all the errors that Vietnamese speakers of any regions of the country can make Moreover, they are also persuasive to linguists who have certain knowledge about Vietnamese dialects Taking final sound into consideration, for instance, /θ/ and /ð/ at word – finally are commonly confused with /t/ and /d/ everywhere,

whereas /p/ sound in /pɒp/ (pop) is often mispronounced with /bɒp/ (Bob) by Southern people and /ʃ/ sound in /pʊʃ/ (push) becomes /pʊs/ (puss) by Northern

people

Tang (2007: 7) offers a comparison table below:

By showing the differences between Vietnamese and English consonant final sounds, Ha (2007) found that Vietnamese learners often simplify or omit the consonants in the final syllables of English words He also noted that when simplifying these final sounds, Vietnamese learners of English have a tendency to replace the English endings with sounds that are common to both Vietnamese and English languages (Tang, 2007, p.21)

Having noted the influence of the Vietnamese L1 on the production of English, it is also important to understand the final syllable sounds that pose the greatest struggle for Vietnamese English language learners (ELLs) Two sounds that are not shared between the two languages as final consonant sounds are the alveolar fricatives /s/ and /z/ While Vietnamese does have these sounds as syllable-initial consonants, they never appear at the end of words (Tang, 2007) Ha (2005) asserts that among Vietnamese speakers of English, the /z/ and /s/ sounds are most

frequently omitted Vietnamese speakers’ also may pronounce /z/ as /s/ Another sound, which is known to pose struggles for Vietnamese speakers, is the alveolar lateral sound /t/

2.3 Vietnamese students’ viewpoint on learning pronunciation

Although students-centered is being taken into action, when magnified it is full of flaws and holes Taking a close look at many public high schools in Vietnam,

it definitely assumes that passing the test in examinations is far important than communicating English in class Owning to many reasons listed such as: the period teaching, the teacher’s accent, a rough way of teaching, students’ capabilities, and bad facilities, etc That would be no sense if not concentrating on how they feel

Inefficient English speaking skill is lately has become a broad and current interest on many educational websites, news and forums In the article of

Tienphong/VNN: “Vietnamese students afraid to speak English”, this site expressed

educators’ concerns that Vietnamese people’ persona are effortlessly shamed when making mistakes, since they have the negative grey opinions to be humiliated

On top of that, however; whilst the speaking lessons, students are also assigned to have a conversation with each other in English Despite such mentioned reasons above, students hardly have the golden opportunity to approach to modern teaching aids The only method students can do is to listen to teachers, “while teachers do not make good pronunciations in all cases” It may lead to the viewpoint

in Ha’s research in 2005 that an average number of fundamental words have been mispronounced by pupils On the other hand, they are believed that these pronunciations were previously taught and acquired at high schools Since they have familiar with the way they learned English pronunciations, giving corrections

or feedbacks are not highly welcomed In other words, giving students’ instructions

is regarded as something unnecessary and time-consuming at university

The conventional methods of teaching have turned learners into the “passive voice” when it comes to English learning In contrast with communication ability, students may just be able to be competent or great at grammar They are on familiar terms with grammar lessons taught at class Hence, rough theories should be linked with practical activities, otherwise the process of learning is probable on “the greasy pole”

CHAPTER 3: METHOD

3.1 Setting

This study took place at Nguyen Khuyen High School It is a public high school which is located at 50 Thanh Thai Street, Ward 12, District 10, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Needless to say, Thanh Thai Street is not only a long, vibrant street

in general, but it is also well - known as “city-centered”

3.2 Participants

From 09 March, 2019 to 23 March, 2019, 90 participants studying at the Nguyen Khuyen High School were enrolled in the survey Half of the participants are from 11L1, whereas the others are from 11B3 They are 11th grade students studying unspecialized English Inclusion criteria reported that age between 16 and

17, agreement to study procedures, ability to provide answers and consent to survey questions in English Besides, along with questionnaires that would be given out to respondents for the statistical representation of the findings in the study, and a recorded clip with the respondents would also be conducted at school Among the participants joining in the study, they were all living in Ho Chi Minh City, and confessed to have 5 English periods per school week While the majority of participants (55.6%) were female, the remaining participants were male

3.3 Data collection/ Method

In order to collect data for the research, I designed a questionnaire with 15 questions, and provided a wordlist (Appendix B) and a sentence passage (Appendix C) The former was created with Google Forms or printed in handouts, while the later was recorded by mobile phone with respondents at least 6 minutes for each person Both were administered during March in 2019 Besides, 15 multiple choice questions about the opinions of Nguyen Khuyen High School’s students toward studying Part E: Language Focus – A Pronunciation in textbooks (see Appendix A), and the wordlist contained four sounds which ended with four final consonant

sounds that are foreign to Vietnamese speakers (/pt/, /bd/, /ps/, /pz/) (see Appendix B).The sentence passage has 6 sentences and include the four target sounds from the wordlist (see Appendix C) Both the wordlist and reading passage were included in this study, and would be presented on the last page of this paper When reading from the wordlist, students would be aware of being evaluated on pronunciation and therefore slowly enunciate each syllable The pronunciation in the context of the reading passage hoped to provide a more authentic representation of how the speakers produce the words with less time to focus on each syllable

3.4 Data statistic

After collecting all the answers to the questionnaire and a two-week interview, quantitative and qualitative method would be carried out Firstly, quantitative method would focus on a number of students spent time on reviewing the pronunciation section based on gender (see in Chapter 4: Figure 1, and Table 1) and reasons to review it (see in Chapter 4: Figure 2) This method was able to collect the data quickly, however; results might be sometimes superficial dataset and hard to draw broad conclusions in context Secondly, two methods as mentioned above would combine together so as to find out participant’s points of view and their concerns about pronunciation difficulties (see in Chapter 4: Figure 3, and Table 2) Then, the datasets were calculated the proportions of all respondents answering in each category by Excel spreadsheet

CHAPTER 4: RESULTS

Of 90 survey samples, the majority of participants all agree the importance of studying English phonology Typically, Nguyen Khuyen high school’s students are main study participants aged from 16 to 17, and are living in Ho Chi Minh City Approximately 51.1% and 48.9% of females and males were participated in this survey during 2 weeks from 09 March, 2019 through 23 March, 2019

It appears that all questions in Appendix A are open-ended ones employed in

my survey, while Appendix B, C, and D with 5 students participating in the survey through recording videos and a face-to-face interview The data collection would be carried out in both quantitative and qualitative methods The former data were calculated by means of Excel, whereas descriptive statistical analyses were performed in this research

Issues Responses

Number of learners’

responses

Percentage of learners’

responses Current English

Table 1: Data analysis of the learners’ attitudes towards their English pronunciation

4.1.2 Perception of phonology instruction and acquisition

Meanwhile, the comparison with the amount of time spent on revision taught English pronunciation by both genders is revealed in figure 5 Through paper questionnaire, 82.6% of boys showed sufficient time to review vocabulary including pronunciation meaning and how it is transcribed, whereas 61.4% of girls paid attention to this When the question was asked unless spending less than 5 minutes, the former gained 6.5% and the figure of the later was 18.2% Also, the other responded the answer “Never” for revising previous knowledge should be seriously born in mind with 9% and 10.9% corresponding for boys and girls The amount of time used toward learning English pronunciation at home among males was worrying especially in the context of the attitude of self-education was higher than that of in women In general, boys should be encouraged to self-review the lesson This would increase the chance to enhance the lesson well and score higher in examination

Figure 2: Number of times spent on self-studying English pronunciation

Needless to say, figure 3 shows four main worries when to study English pronunciation among Nguyen Khuyen High School’s students As can be seen from the chart, the most crucial aspect that learners paid attention to in English pronunciation was the possibility to accomplish an understandable conversation (45.6%) In addition, from figures of about 11.1%, 21.1% and 22.2% among surprising factors with the concerns such as the native-like accent, the segments and the suprasegmental features respectively were given as less important aspect for the general acquiring English communication by students

Overallintelligibility of aspeaker inEnglishcommunication

Suprasegmentalaspects (e.g.,rhythm, stressand intonation)

Segments (i.e vowels and consonants E.g., meet /miːt/)

Figure 3: The concern to English communication acquisition

According to Table 2 below, the vast majority of those who replied the questions to their situations were so apparently It is clear that ESL teacher did have

a strong influence on the acquisition of pronunciation skills Typically, 58.9% of the participants agreed that ESL teachers affected students’ pronunciation learning to some extent And 33.3% of them admitted with the statement that the learning pronunciation process is highly impacted by their ESL teachers

Number of learners’

responses

Percentage of learners’

Table 2: The impact of ESL teachers on learners’ pronunciation achievement rated by

students