SKKN: Teaching English consonants in English textbook 10 effectively.

Teaching English consonants in English textbook 10 effectively. I. Introduction 1. Rationale: In the ages of the world development, intercommunicating and high technology, English has become an international language. As a result, teaching English has become a compulsory subject at schools in Vietnam for many years. And nowadays, it has become more important because in the past, students had to learn English, but they did not have to take English exams in Secondary School Graduation exams. In traditional teaching, students were required to acquire English grammar. But nowadays, in the light of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), students are required not only to have good knowledge of vocabulary and correct grammar, the four language skills but also correct pronunciation. They are required to acquired various skills and language items including English grammar, English vocabulary and English pronunciation.. Accurate pronunciation is a must in English learning for students. Therefore, learning English pronunciation is of great importance to students, even for their exams. In addition, this will help them to have a good job in their future and enable them to communicate with foreigners successfully if they have a chance and the need.

Teaching English consonants in English textbook 10 effectively.

I Introduction

1 Rationale:

In the ages of the world development, intercommunicating and hightechnology, English has become an international language As a result,teaching English has become a compulsory subject at schools in Vietnam formany years And nowadays, it has become more important because in thepast, students had to learn English, but they did not have to take Englishexams in Secondary School Graduation exams In traditional teaching,students were required to acquire English grammar But nowadays, in thelight of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), students are requirednot only to have good knowledge of vocabulary and correct grammar, thefour language skills but also correct pronunciation They are required toacquired various skills and language items including English grammar,English vocabulary and English pronunciation Accurate pronunciation is amust in English learning for students Therefore, learning Englishpronunciation is of great importance to students, even for their exams Inaddition, this will help them to have a good job in their future and enablethem to communicate with foreigners successfully if they have a chance andthe need

Despite realizing this importance, Vietnamese students still can notacquire correct English pronunciation The main reason is that the traditionalteaching laid the emphasis on grammar has led to this problem Manystudents can not pronounce English words and sentences correctly Theyoften pronounce them with equal stress, flat intonation and no rhythm at all

English pronunciation seems to have become the most serious problem thatstudents meet when they learn English This is happening at almost uppersecondary schools in Vietnam except for foreign language specializingschools.

Situated in the central part of the country, Ha Tinh is much poorerthan other provinces and have a lot of difficulties Although Ha tinh is said

to be the place of study and gifts, it still has many weaknesses in terms ofteaching of learning because of some main reasons Firstly, most of theteachers are very young and lack of teaching experience Furthermore, thestudents here mostly come from poor families They do not have goodconditions to study Moreover, classes at Ha tinh upper secondary schoolsare large, crowded and poorly equipped which make speaking lessons moredifficult Therefore, learning condition in Ha Tinh is not really good exceptfor some schools in the city As a certain, their learning English is reallybad And if some students are said to be good at English, it means they aregood at English grammar Most of them find it hard to express themselvesorally If anyone can, he has problems in pronouncing English words andsentences In the English lessons, only teachers speak , and most of the time,teachers have to speak Vietnamese because they are afraid that their students

do not understand what they are speaking Although English has beencompulsory for many years, students in the province have not paid muchattention to it If some students at Ha Tinh upper secondary schools investtime to study the subject, it is just because of the exams they have to take.Many students fail the national examination for the Secondary SchoolDiploma because they can not do English tests well Due to this, studentshere tend to concentrate on English subject more and more However,

because of many factors, especially the objectives of the test, Englishteaching and learning in this area focus much on grammar, not other skills.Traditionally, teachers did not pay much attention to teaching pronunciation.And the old English textbooks did not involve teaching pronunciation,either That is why pronunciation seems to be very difficult for most of thestudents Teachers here tend to ignore teaching pronunciation to thestudents When we teach our students with the new textbooks, most of themare unwilling to have pronunciation lessons in Language Focus part, becausethey find it hard to achieve as good and correct pronunciation as in the CD.For the teachers and students at most of upper secondary schools in HaTinh, pronunciation is a great problem Most students complain aboutdifficulties they get in learning English speaking skill in general and inpronunciation in particular with the new textbook We ourselves realize thatour students really have bad pronunciation As a result, students here have alot of problems when they do the tests on pronunciation as a part of thegraduate examinations And they also get a lot of difficulties in speakingEnglish, even simple words or sentences This is a serious problem not only

at Ha Tinh upper-secondary schools but also at many other mountainous andremoted schools So, investigating the problems and then find out somesuggestions to improve the situation are very helpful for teaching andlearning English at our school

Because of these above reasons, I decided to do research on students’difficulties in learning English pronunciation But with the limitation of timeand space, I just focus on common English consonant problems andtechniques to improve the situation entitled: “An investigation into Ha TinhUpper Secondary students’difficulties in learning English consonants and

techniques to improve the situation” The study was conducted to seek theanswers to the question of which English consonants students at uppersecondary schools often have difficulties with and what techniques should

be applied to help them overcome those difficulties

3 Scope of the study:

Because lack of research conditions and time, the study was only to investigate the main English consonant problems

The participants I chose for the research were only the students at my schools With classroom observation, I chose all the students in classes that Iattended to be the participants With the experimental application, students

in two classes of grade 10th were chosen to do the designed exercises and

to test the results

4 Research methodology:

The study employed different methods and instruments to get the data

- With the first task, investigating the main consonant problems that studentsoften meet when they learn English, I mostly employed classroom

observation and note- taking as well as my own experience of teaching English in Ha Tinh for many years

- With the second task, checking whether the techniques I suggested are effective or not, I did an experiment

II Literature review

1 Some main differences between the two language consonant systems- A contrastive anlysis.

To find out the most common consonant problems that Vietnamese high school students often meet, firstly, a comparison between the two consonant systems should be made first because the consonant systems between the two languages also differ greatly

It is clear that there are a lot of differences in the comparison ofVietnamese and English consonant systems According to Roach, P (1983),English has twenty- four consonants They are: p, b, m, f, v, t, d, k, g, θ, δ, s,

z, l, z, h, n, ŋ, r, j, w, t∫, dʒ, ∫ The classification of these consonants is based

on the manner of articulation and place of articulation Vietnamese is differentfrom English Vietnamese has 30 consonants It has twenty-two initialconsonants pointed out by Doan Thien Thuat (initial consonants are oneswhich stand at the beginning of a syllable) They are : b, m, f, v, t, t, d, n, s,

z , l, ţ, ş, z, , c, …k, ŋ, x, γ, p, h In addition to 22 initial consonants above,Vietnamese has 8 final consonants including 6 consonants and 2 semi-consonants or 2 semi- vowels

Comparing the two consonant systems, we can see that, firstly, thereare some English consonants which do not exist in Vietnamese language such

as dʒ, θ, ð, j, w…That these symbols do not exist in Vietnamese is a greatdifficulty for them to acquire They are not familiar with these ones, so it isvery difficult for them to produce the correct sounds of these consonants

Besides, learners have a confusion of similar sounds: /b/ and /p/, /dʒ/and /ð, /θ/ and /th/…and have difficulty in pronouncing consonant clusterssuch as /desks/, /fifθ/ in the words “desks” and “fifth” because consonantclusters do not exist in Vietnamese

Another difference that can cause pronunciation problems related togrammar which do not occur in Vietnamese That is ‘s-ending’ in pluralnouns, the third singular personal verbs (Simple Present tense) and “ed-ending’ in regular past verbs and regular past participles Vietnameselearners often pronounce ‘s-ending’ as /s/ and ‘ed-ending’ as /ɪd/ but in factEnglish is different and is not always pronounced like that The main reasonfor this is that in Vietnamese, there is no concept of the voiced consonantsand voiceless consonants If teachers provide learners with some mainclassifications of consonants including the state of the vocal cords (voicedand voiceless), learners can avoid wrong pronunciation in this case Forexample, they can know when they pronounce ‘s-ending’ as /s/, /z/, /ɪz/ and

‘ed-ending’ as /ɪd/, /t/, /d/ for phonetic words ending in voiced, voiceless orsome specific sounds…

In addition, Vietnamese learners have a confusion of the form of theindefinite article: ‘a/an’ and the way to pronounce definite article: ‘the’.They know that ‘a’ stands before a consonant and ‘an’ before a vowel butsometimes they can’t explain some problems such as a university, an M.P,

an hour…and they still make mistakes Teachers need explain to them that

consonants and vowels here are phonetic words but not letters (ju:n ɪvəsə ti/, /mpɪ/ and / aʊə/ ) and the rule for a/an does not change ‘The’ is

pronounced as /ðə/ when it stands before a consonant and as /ðɪ/ before avowel Nevertheless, Vietnamese learners can not distinguish this without

realizing English phonetic symbols, specially consonants Consequently,teachers should pay attention to the missing knowledge of consonants oflearners in order to instruct them in time.

The above is a brief comparison between the two consonant systems

in which the main differences between Vietnamese consonant system andthe English one are pointed out so that we can analyze the main consonantproblems more easily

2 Some common pronunciation problems.

Doff, A.(1988:113) pointed out that students in different countrieshave different problems with English pronunciation However, there aresome common pronunciation problems that learners often make when theyspeak English According to him, there are some main categories of commonproblems that are likely to occur as followings:

- Difficulties in pronouncing sounds which do not exist in thestudents’ own language For example, the consonant /ð/ is of great hard forVietnamese students of English because this sound does not exist inVietnamese language

- Confusion of similar sounds, e.g /ð/ and /z/

- Difficulty in pronouncing consonant clusters

As I mentioned in the previous part, there are many consonants that

exist in English but do not exist in Vietnamese So Vietnamese learners of

second English language often have many problems with the system ofEnglish consonants The problems that they have with English consonantsseem to be many more than the ones that they have with English vowels.The followings are common mistakes that Vietnamese students often meet

when they speak English pointed out by Avery, P and Ehrlich, S.(1992).

Problem 1: Word- final voiceless stop consonants :/p/, /t/, and /k/

In Vietnamese, the voiceless stop consonants /p/, /t/, and /k/ occur atthe end of a word, but these consonants are never released in final positionand is much shorter than their English equivalents This means that evenwhen Vietnamese speakers pronounce these consonants in final position,English speakers may have difficulty hearing them Thus, a word such as

“beat” may sound like “ bee”

Problem 2: Voiced and voiceless stops in word final position: /b/,

Problem 4 : / θ/ and /ð/ as in “thank” and “than”

In fact, these two consonants do not occur in Vietnamese In stead,there are two consonants in Vietnamese that make them difficult todistinguish with these / θ/ and /ð/, they are “th” (sound like the aspirated

“t”) and “d”( sound like the consonant “z” in English In fact, the manner ofproducing these Vietnamese sounds are different from the two / θ/ and /ð/,

but their sounds seem a little the same That is why Vietnamese studentsoften substitute a /d/ for /ð/ and a “t” for / θ/.

Problem 5 : Consonant clusters.

In Vietnamese, consonant clusters do not happen at the initial andfinal position When they speak English, they have to meet a lot ofconsonant clusters that contain many consonants at the same time Thiscauses a lot of difficulties for them because they are not familiar with this.Often, Vietnamese students tend to omit one or two consonants in aconsonant cluster For example, they may pronounce the word “ first” into /fɜ:t/ or the word “looked” into /lʊk/ or /lʊt/

Problem 6: “-ed” and “-s” ending problems as mentioned above.

In short, I have given out the main problems that Vietnamese studentsoften have when they learn English consonants With the main problems, Isuggest some recommended techniques to teach English effectively

3 Classroom observation and findings

To check whether students at Ha Tinh upper secondary schools meetthe same problems as above, I did a lot of classroom observation with mystudents Certainly, classroom observation is an instrument that can helpresearchers bolster the qualitative and quantitative results Hopkins(1993)described classroom observation as a “pivotal activity” with a crucial role toplay in classroom research, teachers’ personal professional growth, andschool development as a whole ( as cited in McDonough, J and McDonough,

S 1997:101) McDonough, J and McDonough also stated that observationwith its associated instruments can help researchers gain the validity of the

data So it can help me test the validity of the data obtained about students’difficulties in learning English consonants

When observing the class, I did a lot of note taking to ensure that theinformation collected was rich and triangulated To make the students feelcomfortable in the lessons, I just sat at the last row and took part in manydifferent lessons as a non-participant observer to have a naturalisticobservation

From many different observed lessons, I found out that students herehad a lot problems with English consonants, but the most common ones arethe mistakes as mentioned above However, from my classroom observation,

I also realize that ending sounds are of great problem to our students Theytend to omit the ending sounds For example, the word "five", "find",

"fight", "fine" may be pronouced the same

III Some recommended techniques to help teachers and students better the situation.

In accordance with the above problems, the followings will be somesuggestions for English pronunciation teaching for upper secondary schoolteachers of English

First of all, I would like to state that the teachers’ methods ofpronunciation teaching play a very important role in motivating andimproving students’ English in general and students’ pronunciation inparticular If the techniques employed in the lessons are various and suitable,they will make the lesson easier to understand and more interesting tofollow As a result, the students will be motivated to study With the fact thatmost classes in Vietnamese upper secondary schools are large and