An investigation into the 11th graders'' difficulties in learning English pronuciation at Thanh Chuong 3 high school

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAININGVINH UNIVERSITY VO THI HUONG LY DIFFICULTIES IN LEARNING ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION AT THANH CHUONG 3 HIGH SCHOOL MASTER’S THESIS IN EDUCATION... MINISTRY OF

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

VINH UNIVERSITY

VO THI HUONG LY

DIFFICULTIES IN LEARNING ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION AT THANH CHUONG 3

HIGH SCHOOL

MASTER’S THESIS IN EDUCATION

NGHE AN - 2014

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

VINH UNIVERSITY

VO THI HUONG LY

DIFFICULTIES IN LEARNING ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION AT THANH CHUONG 3

HIGH SCHOOL

Field: Theory and Methodology of English Language Teaching

Code: 60.14.01.11

MASTER’S THESIS IN EDUCATION

Supervisor: NGUYEN GIA VIET Ph.D

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP

I hereby acknowledge that this study is mine The data and findingsdiscussed in the thesis are true, used with permission, and have not beenpublished elsewhere

Author

Vo Thi Huong Ly

Secondly, I would like to thank all of the teachers from Thanh Chuong

3 high school and all accounting students at Thanh Chuong 3 high school fortheir enthusiastic participation and helpful contribution to my research

I also would like to give my thank to my beloved family and friendswho support me, encourage and help me all the time I do my research

Vo Thi Huong Ly

ABSTRACT

This master thesis deals with the importance of teaching pronunciation

of the English language at high schools As the global character of Englishlanguage is strengthened every day, the only knowledge of English grammarand vocabulary is not sufficient as the importance of being able to lead anintelligible and effective communication plays a great role as well Therefore,this master thesis aims at finding out some of the ways which can make animprovement in terms of teaching pronunciation in English lessons

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Pages

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS iv

LIST OF TABLES vii

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Rationale 1

1.2 Purpose of the Study 2

1.3 Scope of the Study 3

1.4 The research questions 3

1.5 Research methodology 3

1.6 Setting and background 4

1.7 Outline of the Study 5

CHAPTER 2 THEORICAL BACKGROUND 7

2.1 Role of pronunciation in communicative competence and in foreign language learning 7

2.2 Approaches to pronunciation teaching –pronunciation teaching Methodologies 8

2.3 Factors affecting pronunciation learning 10

2.3.1 The native language 10

2.3.2 The age 11

2.3.3 Phonetic ability 12

2.3.4 Attitudes and identity 12

2.3.5 Motivation and concern for good pronunciation 13

2.4 Differences in the sound systems between English and Vietnamese 13

2.4.1 Phonemes 13

2.4.2 Vowels 13

2.4.3 Consonants 14

2.4.4 Stress 14

2.4.5 Intonation 15

2.4.6 Linking sounds 15

2.5 Common English pronunciation problems encountered by Vietnamese learners 18

2.5.1 Vowel problems 19

2.5.2 Consonant problems 21

2.5.3 Stress, rhythm and intonation problems 23

CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 25

3.1 Methodology 25

3.1.1 The research questions 25

3.1.2 Method orientation 25

3.1.3 The characteristics of a case study 26

3.1.4 The participants 28

3.1.5 The instruments 28

3.1.6 Data analysis process 31

3.2 Conclusion 31

CHAPTER 4 DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSIONS 32

4.1 Data analysis: 32

4.1.1 Questionnaires 32

4.1.2 Interview: Students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation as experienced by teachers at Thanh chuong 3 high School 42

4.1.3 Classroom observation 48

4.2.Conclusion 53

CHAPTER 5 RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS 54

5.1 Summary of the findings 54

5.2 Suggestions for pronunciation teaching in high schools 56

5.2.1 Amount of Exposure 56

5.2.2 Attitudes and motivation 56

5.2.3 Suggested teaching techniques 57

5.3 Conclusion 67

5.3.1 Conclusion of the study 67

5.3.2 Limitations of the study 67

5.3.3 Suggestions for further studies 68

REFERENCES 69 APPENDIX

37Table 4.4 Students’ awareness of the concepts of stress, intonation and

rhythm 39Table 4.5 Students evaluation on difficulties in learning English

intonation 41

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Rationale

English has become a language for global communication these days Inthis common trend, English in Vietnam has become one of the important,compulsory subjects at schools, from primary school to high school system

No longer are students merely required to master English grammar andvocabulary to sit for a test, they are now studying English to develop theirown communicative skills, of which intelligible pronunciation plays a crucialpart With poor pronunciation, students have problems either making themselvesunderstood or understanding others Therefore, there should be the appropriateattention to teaching and learning pronunciation

Despite realizing the importance of English pronunciation, Vietnamesestudents still can not acquire correctly The main reason is that the traditionalteaching laid the emphasis on grammar Many students can not pronounceEnglish words and sentences correctly They often pronounce them with equalstress, flat intonation and no rhythm at all English pronunciation seems tohave become the most serious problem that students face when they learnEnglish This is happening in most upper secondary schools in Vietnam exceptfor foreign language specializing schools

Situated in a remote area in Thanh Chuong district, Nghe An province,Thanh Chuong 3 high school is far weaker than other schools regardingstudents' English proficiency at English And if some students are said to begood at English, it means they are good at English grammar Most of themfind it hard to express themselves orally If anyone can, he has problems inpronouncing English words and sentences In the English lessons, only

teachers speak , and most of the time, they have to speak Vietnamese becausethey are concerned that their students do not understand what they are saying.When the new textbook is introduced, almost students complain about thedifficulties they get in learning English speaking skill in general and inpronunciation in particular From the very first day of my teaching career inhere, from my own observation and experiences, I could tell that they hadserious problems in pronunciation during the pronunciation course eventhough each lesson was designed with clear, stated objectives A number ofstudents mispronounced separated words and words combined in a sentence.Others pronounced a sentence with equal stress, flat intonation and no rhythm atall And we ourselves realize that our students really have bad pronunciation.

As a result, students here have a lot of problems when they do the tests onpronunciation as a part the graduate examinations This is a serious problemnot only at Thanh Chuong 3 high school but also at many other mountainousschools

Being motivated by the situation, I was determined to carry out a casestudy in order to figure out the problems in learning English pronunciationmet by the 11th grade at Thanh Chuong 3 high school entitled: “An investigationinto the 11th graders’difficulties in learning English pronunciation at Chuong 3high school”

The research findings would be followed by suggestions for studentswith the hope that the students at my school could improve their Englishpronunciation

1.2 Purpose of the Study

The main aims:

-To investigate the difficulties that Thanh Chuong 3 high school studentsmeet when they learn English pronunciation

-To recommend some suggestions for teachers and learners to overcomethese difficulties.

To achieve these aims, some main objectives were defined as the followings:

- To find out students’ attitudes towards learning English in general andlearning English pronunciation in particular

- To investigate how difficult the English pronunciation is for the students

- To find out what causes the difficulties

- To offer some recommendations

1.3 Scope of the Study

The study was just conducted on a focused group of one hundred of grade

Thanh Chuong 3 high school students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation and giving some suggested recommendations.

1.4 The research questions

Questions for the study:

a What are their main difficulties in learning English pronunciation?

b What are the causes of these difficulties?

1.5 Research methodology

This study is conducted as a case study which employs multiple methodsincluding qualitative and quantitative methods The former uses naturalisticobservation, narrative diaries, and collection of existing information while thelater makes use of such instruments as questionnaires and structured interviews.+ Questionnaire was designed to investigate students’ attitude towardslearning English as well as English pronunciation and their main difficulties

in learning pronunciation.There were ten items in the questionnaire, the firstthree of which aimed at finding out students’ attitudes towards learning Englishspeaking in general and towards learning English pronunciation in particular

The remaining seven items were designed to find out whether they had difficulties

in learning English pronunciation or not and what difficulties were asexperienced by the students All the items in the questionnaire involvedclosed and open-ended questions with the intention of getting deep andreliable data After collecting the data from the questionnaires, I analyzed the dataqualitatively and quantitatively

+ Classroom observation was employed to see what the main Englishpronunciation problems were I observed five different lessons which weregiven by four teachers selected randomly including three speaking lessonsand two Language focus ones Each of these teachers presented an Englishlesson in a 45 minute period Classroom observation was also used to observestudents’ attitude towards English pronunciation

+ The last method – interviewing teachers at Thanh Chuong 3 high school was toget deeper and clearer insights into students’ difficulties in learning pronunciation.This step was to support the first and second instruments, questionnaires andclassroom observation, to get and analyze the data reliably

1.6 Setting and background

Located in a remote area in Thanh Chuong district, Nghe An province,Thanh Chuong 3 high school has a lot of weaknesses and difficulties Most ofthe teachers are very young and lack of teaching experience Furthermore, thestudents there mostly come from poor families They do not have goodconditions to study Because of these above reasons, Thanh Chuong 3 highschool is somewhat weaker than other schools And as a certain, English isreally limited Although English has been compulsory for many years,students have not paid much attention to it If some students at this schoolinvest time to study the subject, it is just because of the exams they have to

take Some of students fail the national examination for the Secondary SchoolDiploma because they can not do English tests well Due to this, studentsthere tend to concentrate on English subject more and more However,because of many factors, especially the objectives of the test, English teachingand learning in this area focus much on grammar, not other skills Teachersthere tend to ignore teaching pronunciation to the students That is whypronunciation seems to be very difficult for most of the students Moreover,large class size and poorly-equipped classrooms make speaking lessons moredifficult Because of these, students at Thanh Chuong 3 High School are weak

at speaking English, and they often have wrong pronunciation Traditionally,teachers did not pay much attention to teaching pronunciation And the oldEnglish textbooks did not involve teaching pronunciation, either When weteach our students with the new textbooks, most of them are unwilling to havepronunciation lessons in Language Focus part, because they find it hard toachieve as good and correct pronunciation as in the CD For the teachers andstudents at this school, pronunciation is a great problem

1.7 Outline of the Study

This thesis is presented in five chapters

The first chapter, Introduction, provides a brief overview of the study Chapter Two reviews the relevant literature for the study This chapterpresents the theoretical background of the thesis which contains six mainpoints: Role of pronunciation in communicative competence and in foreignlanguage learning; Approaches to pronunciation teaching - pronunciation teachingmethodologies; Factors affecting pronunciation learning; Differences in the soundsystems between English and Vietnamese; Common English pronunciationproblems encountered by Vietnamese learners

Three deals with the research methodology In this chapter, the focus

will be on background information of the subject of the study, the instrumentsused to collect data and the procedure of data collection as well.

The next chapter, Chapter Four, presents a description of data analysis,(findings) and discussions With the description of data analysis through threeinstruments: questionnaire, classroom observation and the interview, I exploredsome interpretations of the findings

The last chapter, Conclusion, is devoted to the summary of the findingsand some pedagogical recommendations to help teachers and students in uppersecondary schools to overcome difficulties in learning and teaching Englishpronunciation.This chapter also acknowledges the limitations of the study as well

as some recommended directions for further study

CHAPTER 2 THEORICAL BACKGROUND

2.1 Role of pronunciation in communicative competence and in foreign language learning

Many people learning English language often do not pay any attention totheir pronunciation Even worse some of them underestimate it, they thinkthat pronunciation is less important than grammar and vocabulary In fact,pronunciation is extremely important Many cases of misunderstand in communicationwere caused by the mispronouncing of words or the improper intonation Let'stake a few examples: if some one pronounces the words fog and fox, sea andshe, sick and six with relatively no differences, in some cases can lead to

misunderstanding Another example when one pronounces the word present with stress in the first syllable, whereas she uses in the sentence " I'd like to

present" is certainly incorrect and irritating So it has been obvious whypronunciation is important In addition, good pronunciation can also give aplus value to those who master it

Pronunciation is as important as any other aspects of language likesyntax or vocabulary Correct pronunciation is very necessary to develop ourspeaking skill Pronunciation also has many other connections to the otherfields such as listening, spelling and even grammar For example, if someone

is good at pronunciation, he will be able to comprehend the spoken Englishmore easily Or if a person understands and uses the rhythm, intonation andstress correctly, he will make the listeners understand better Even pronunciationhas connection to grammar, especially in English The speaker whopronounces correctly the endings of the words, for example,can give grammaticalinformation

In short, pronunciation has important values not only in oral communicationbut also in foreign language learning Acquiring good pronunciation is what alearner needs to make effort to do on the way of mastering a foreign language

2.2 Approaches to pronunciation teaching –pronunciation teaching Methodologies

The two general approaches to pronunciation teaching described inCelce-Murcia et al (1996) have been adopted by many researchers, which areintuitive-imitative approach and analytical-linguistic approach

An intuitive-imitative approach assumes that students can develop acceptablepronunciation and speaking skills when exposed to the target language throughaccurate models This approach relies heavily upon imitation and repetition,without any explicit information provided by teachers

The Direct method, which gained acceptance in the late 1800s and1900s, was formed from observations of children attaining their firstlanguage In this method, students would listen and imitate a model of thetarget language that was spoken by the teacher (and later by recordings).(Celce-Murcia et al, 1996) However, students who showed accuracy incontrolled practice might fail to transfer what they learned to actualcommunicative language use (Cohen, Larson-Freeman, & Tarone, 1991) From the late 1960s and the early 1980s, there was a decline in explicitpronunciation teaching with the invention of the language lab The TotalPhysical Response by Ashers's (1977) and Natural Approach by Krashen andTerrell's (1983) were among the most popular in the pronunciation training InTotal Physical Response, students would begin to speak when they wereready and they were expected to make errors in the initial stage The maininitial focus of Natural Approach was listening, which gave students theopportunities to internalize the target sound system Indeed, many

contemporary researchers still adopt this view but it still needs furtherinvestigating if the method has the persuasive foundation

An analytical-linguistic approach recognized the importance of explicitintervention of pronunciation pedagogy in language acquisition Theapproach employs a variety of pedagogical aids including phonetic chart,contrastive exercises and articulatory descriptions In this approach, studentsare given explicit information about how to produce the sounds and rhythms

of the target language

The 1980s witnessed the significant shift with discourse basedcommunicative approach with the ultimate goal was communication Underthis trend, pronunciation teaching focused more on a “top-down” approachinstead of the original “bottom up” method of teaching isolated sounds Inother words, the focus of teaching pronunciation seemed to shift from mastery

of segmentals (e.g.vowels and consonants) to fluency, highlighting the importance

of elements of suprasegmentals (Pennington, & Richards, 1986) Techniquesused to teach pronunciation included listening and imitating, phonetictraining, minimal pairs drilling in context, visual aids, reading aloud,recording the students‟ production with more focus on suprasegmentalaspects of pronunciation It can be seen that communicative approach seems

to be more balanced approach with the focus on both accuracy and fluency.The approach had characteristics of both intuitive-imitative approach andanalytical-linguistic approach

In the light of communicative language teaching (CLT), learners areexpected to achieve “intelligible pronunciation” of the target language, which

is, according to Kenworthy, (1987), understood by a listener at a given time in

a given situation That is, students are able to understand, accept and declare

to be recognized meaningfully in their oral communication

To sum up, trends of teaching pronunciation have been changing a lot

during different periods Nowadays, teaching pronunciation plays a veryimportant part in the language teaching It is the main target connected withother skills to get the highest purpose of learning a foreign language, which iscommunication

2.3 Factors affecting pronunciation learning

There are many factors affecting the learners' pronunciation According

to Kenworthy (1987:4-9), factors such as the native language, the age, amount

of exposure, phonetic ability, attitude and identity, motivation and concern forgood pronunciation have great influence on pronunciation learning

2.3.1 The native language

The native language plays an important role in learning to pronounceEnglish as it is clearly seen that a foreign accent is influenced by some of thesound characteristics of the learner's native language Due to the role of nativelanguage, there has been a great deal of research on the differences betweensound systems of English and other languages in terms of sound system aswell as problems, difficulties the learners face when studying English.According to Kenworthy, (1992: 4): "To put it very crudely, the moredifferences there are, the more difficulties the learners will have in pronouncingEnglish.”

According to Peter Avery and Susan Ehrlich (1992), the native languagecan determine the nature of a foreign accent We can see this clearly from thefact that speakers of English are easy to recognize Vietnamese accents,Chinese accents, Japanese accents, etc In other words, learners can transferthe sound patterns of the native language into the second language Everylanguage has different inventory of sounds, different rules for combiningthese sounds into words, and different stress and intonation patterns Learnersmake errors in pronunciation not just when they attempt to produce unfamiliar

sounds but also when they reflect the sound inventory, rules of combinationand the stress and intonation patterns of the native language.

Peter Avery and Susan Ehrlich (1992) stated that the sound system of thenative language influence students’ pronunciation of English in at least threeways First of all, learners may have difficulties when they meet sounds inEnglish that are not part of the sound inventory of the learners’ nativelanguage According to these two linguists, the pronunciation of soundsdepends on the proper use of the musculature in the mouth That is why adultlearners are difficult to produce new sounds because they have neverexercised their mouths to do that The second way is because the rules forcombining sounds into words are different in the learner’s native language.Learners may face with this type of difficulty when they learn a particularsound that is part of the inventory of both English and the native language.Thirdly, learners can transfer the patterns of stress and intonation, whichdetermine the overall rhythm and melody of a language from the nativelanguage into the second language

What Peter Avery and Susan Ehrlich (1992) mentioned here is that therole of the native language is very important to the second languagepronunciation learning because the native language not only affects the ability

to produce English sounds but also the ability to hear English sounds

It is proved that the more differences between the two languages thereare, the more difficulty the students have to cope with pronunciation

2.3.2 The age

It is commonly assumed that people can pronounce a foreign languagelike a native if they start learning it as a child This leads to a question thatwhether there is an age-related limit on the mastery of pronunciation We cansee that adult second language learners often have a foreign accent while childsecond language learners often attain native-like pronunciation As many

experienced teachers of foreign languages know, most of adult learners havedifficulties in acquiring native-like pronunciation However, it does not meanthat no adult can achieve native-like pronunciation In fact, some adults dovery well in learning pronunciation and among other adult learners, the degree

of pronunciation accuracy varies considerably from one to another Therefore,the critical period hypothesis do not absolve English Second Language teachers ofthe responsibility of teaching pronunciation

Another factor is the amount of exposure to English the learner receives.However, it does not totally mean learners who have more opportunitiesspeaking and listening with the native English speakers can have betterEnglish pronunciation Based on some recent studies, it seems that amount ofexposure is not a necessary factor but a contributory factor for thedevelopment of pronunciation skills

2.3.4 Attitudes and identity

It has been claimed that factors such as a person's "sense of identity" andfeelings of "group affiliation" are strong determiners of the acquisition ofaccurate pronunciation of a foreign language In many studies of attitude andmotivation in language learning, it has been shown that those learners whoshow positive feelings towards the speakers of the new language tend todevelop more accurate, native-like accents

2.3.5 Motivation and concern for good pronunciation

It cannot be denied that motivation is an important factor that determines

the people's participation in every activity especially in language learning.Motivation makes people more active in learning The more motivated thepeople are, the greater the cognitive process is Celce Murcia, Brinton, &Goodwin (1996) considered that motivation and concern for good pronunciationaffect pronunciation accuracy

In short, there are many factors affecting pronunciation Teachers of foreignlanguages should be aware of these factors when teaching pronunciation

2.4 Differences in the sound systems between English and Vietnamese

There are a number of books discussing this matter In this study, thedetailed comparison of Vietnamese and English pronunciation by Doan ThienThuat (2003), Nguyen Thien Giap (1997), Ha Cam Tam (2005), O'Connor(1967), McNeil (1987), Hinst and Cristo, (1998) has been adopted The maindifferences between English and Vietnamese pronunciation are presentedhereafter:

2.4.1 Phonemes

In Vietnamese, a letter is often represented by the same phoneme (except/r/, /ng, ngh/, /k/ (c, k) While in English, the same letter may representdifferent sounds

Besides, many words contain silent letters which may be at any positions

in the word This feature is quite a challenge for Vietnamese students in learningpronunciation

2.4.3 Consonants

English has 24 consonants but there are only 22 in Vietnamese Thereare some phonemes in English but not in Vietnamese and vice versa InVietnamese, a letter is often represented by the same phoneme In English,some phonemes seem to be represented by identical letters but differentpronunciation Vietnamese in general is spoken with a staccato delivery Syllablesand words are not linked together as in English but are clearly separated from eachother Especially final consonant clusters cause the greatest difficulties forVietnamese students

2.4.4 Stress

Vietnamese is a basically monosyllabic language Unlike English - apolysyllabic language, most Vietnamese words have only one syllable Andunstressed syllable do not occur in Vietnamese Even in compound nouns,each syllable has its own distinctive tone This is the reason why stress withinwords does not exist in Vietnamese Moreover, English stress placements can bechanged by the addition of the prefixes and suffixes or with different vocabularyitems

For example:

-ee (employ→ employee)

-ique (tech → technique)

-aire (question → questionnaire)

-eous (advantage → advantageous)

-ion (situate → situation)

-graphy (photograph → photography)

So, stress seems to be of great challenge to Vietnamese students.Another matter that the monosyllable nature of Vietnamese language causes

is that Vietnamese students are not familiar with weaken vowels in

conjunction with unstressed syllables It means that stressed syllables inEnglish is spoken with more effort and energy meanwhile the unstressed onesare spoken with less effort and the vowels in unstressed syllables areweakened And it is very difficult for them to remember that they have toreduce the vowels in unstressed syllables into schwa

2.4.5 Intonation

There are six tones in Vietnamese: level tone, falling lone (grave), risingtone (acute), broken tone (till), dot, and low-rising These ones are lexical; theychange the meaning of words, just as changing one of the segmental phonemes(consonants and vowels) in English can change the meaning of a word

In English, on the other hand, intonation plays a much greater part Astatement can be made into question by using intonation without changing theword order, which is not possible in Vietnamese

That is the reason why Vietnamese learners, while studying English, donot pay much attention to learning English intonation, as they are not aware

of the importance of using correct intonation

In conclusion, Vietnamese and English sound systems are different Ateacher of English should take all these differences into consideration in order

to make the learning and the teaching process more effective Basing on thesecomponents of pronunciation, moreover, the 11th students' difficulties in learningEnglish pronunciation would be discussed in details

2.4.6 Linking sounds

Vietnamese words are spoken with weakened breath out flow at the finalboundary with distinct separation between words Because of this difference,Vietnamese students often make mistakes when they speak English Theyusually speak English words and syllables separately It is very difficult forthem to understand native English speakers because of the link between thelast consonant of the words to the following word which begins with a vowel

Below are some examples of linking words:

1-Linking consonant to vowel (CTV)

Explanation:

Say [sto peating] and you will be saying [stop eating]

2-Linking consonant to consonant (CTC)

If CTV is the most common word linking pattern in spoken English, CTC is the most difficult to apply as it involves loads of details and presents a number of exceptions.

we are “holding” it in, and in Example 1, we “hold” it in for a little longer before we release the air for [playing].

3-Linking vowel to vowel (VTV)

This pattern involves linking the words ending with a vowel to those thatalso begin with one.

When vowels /uː/ or /oʊ/ come before any other vowel, native speakers linkthem using consonant /w/ For example, [you are] sounds like [you ware] and[who is it] sounds like [who wiz it] etc

In short, there are many differences between the two language soundsystems that can cause difficulties to Vietnamese learners when they learnEnglish The comparison gives clearer cut reasons why our learners oftenmake mistakes when they learn English pronunciation This is the foundationfor me to study students’s main difficulties in acquiring English pronunciationmore easily and scientifically

2.5 Common English pronunciation problems encountered by Vietnamese learners

For most Vietnamese learners, learning English pronunciation is of greatchallenge

As being mentioned above, great differences between the sound systems

of English and Vietnamese cause a number of problems to Vietnamesespeakers when they study English pronunciation Vietnamese is a tonelanguage, that is, pitch changes distinguish word meaning Most words inVietnamese consist of only one syllable, there are fewer consonants than inEnglish and there is no consonant cluster That is why they often meet somemain problems when producing English as followed:

2.5.1 Vowel problems

Avery and Ehrlich (1992) pointed out that while Vietnamese make manyword distinctions, the English lax vowel pairs are still problems to them Theyoften meet difficulties in distinguishing vowels such as /e/ vs /æ/, short /ɪ/ vs.long /i:/, /ə/ vs /ɜ:/, /ɒ/ vs /ɔ:/ Vietnamese students often produce the samemanner with these two different pairs of vowels This can cause misunderstanding

to foreigners.

Below are some examples of the sounds that Vietnamese learners oftenconfuse:

Confusing /ɪ/ for /i:/

Vowel /ɪ/ is quite frequently spelled as letter [i] in English and sinceVietnamese rely on spelling to produce the English sounds, they confuse /ɪ/for /i/

Example:

/i/: Need; read; teat; leave; meat; wheel; seat

/ɪ/: Knit; rid; tit; live; mitt; will; sit

Confusing /æ/ for /ʌ/

This error is among many generated by the learners’ unawareness of thegap that exists between the English spelling and pronunciation Vowel /æ/ isquite often spelled with letter [a] which learners would then read as /ʌ/ or /a/.Teachers must repeatedly remind the students that English spelling andpronunciation are two very different things

/æ/: bad; man day; hat; badge; tramp

/ʌ/: bud; Monday, hut; budge; trump

Confusing /ʊ/ for /uː/

These two vowels are sometimes spelled the same as in [foot] and[food] Teachers must explain the difference between lax vower sound tense

as well as short vower sound, long vowels and conduct some minimal pairs’exercises to drill these sounds and assist learners in distinguishing betweenthem

Example:

/u:/: Room; tooth; food; mood; rude; wooed

/ʊ/: Book; put; foot; hood; could; would

Confusing /ɝ/ for /ɔː/

Vowel /ɝ/ is quite difficult for most English learners including Vietnameseand is usually mispronounced as /ɔː/ which could considerably affect thespeech intelligibility

Example:

/ɝ/: First; sir; burn; curl; work; learn; worm

/ɔː/: Forced; soar; born; call; walk; lawn; warm

Confusing/eɪ/ for /e/

Diphthongs are very complex sounds as they require combining one voweland one consonant in one sound and these combinations are unfamiliar to theVietnamese learners who typically end up dropping consonant /j/ and retainingvowel /e/

Example:

/eɪ/: fade; date; wait; trained; bake; cane; wage

/e/: fed; debt; wet; trend; beck; Ken; wedge

Confusing/oʊ/ for /ɔː/

Vowel /oʊ/ is another diphthong involving vowel /o/ and consonant /w/and as in the above problem, only the vowel is retained while the consonant isdropped Teachers must encourage the learners to round their lips at the end

of that sound after pushing them forward for /ɔː/

Example:

/oʊ/: Wrote; old; boat; coat; mode; road; showed

Confusing the schwa sounds/ə/ or /ɚ/

One of the most important English sounds yet most neglected by teachers isthe schwa sound This smallest sound in the English language is crucial forreasonably accurate production of stress and rhythm and without it, theVietnamese learners, and all English learners, will never be able to fullyunderstand natural and native-like English speech The schwa sound can bespelled as: [a] [e] [o] [u] and [y] That can cause plenty of confusion forlearners who will again attempt to pronounce the words as written, not asspoken

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

In Vietnamese, the voiceless stop consonants /p/, /t/ and /k/ occur at theend of a word, but these consonants are never released in final position andare much shorter than their English equivalents This means even when Vietnamesespeakers pronounce these consonants in final position, English speakers may havedifficulties hearing them Thus, a word such as “beat” may sound like “bee” Problem 2: Voiced and voiceless stops in word final position: /b/, /d/, /g/,

vs /p/, /t/, /k/

As Vietnamese has no voiced stops at the ends of words, Vietnamesespeakers need to practice in distinguishing between voiced and voicelessstops in this position For example, words such as “cap” and “cab” may soundidentical, with a short unreleased /p/ at the end of both words

Problem 3: Word final fricative consonants: /f/, /v/, /θ/, /ð/, /s/, /z/, /ʃ/and /dʒ/

In Vietnamese, the above fricatives do not occur at the final position of aword, but in English, they do That is why Vietnamese students often omitthese fricatives at the ends of the sounds

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

In fact, these two consonants do not occur in Vietnamese In stead, thereare two consonants in Vietnamese that make them difficult to distinguish withthese /θ/ and /ð/, they are “th” (sound like the aspirated “t”) and “d” (soundlike the consonant “z” in English) In fact, the manner of producing theseVietnamese sounds is different from the two /θ/ and /ð/, but their sounds seem

a little the same That is why Vietnamese students often substitute a /d/ for /ð/and a /t/ for /θ/

Problem 5: Consonant clusters

In Vietnamese consonant clusters do not happen at the initial and finalposition When they speak English, they have to meet a number of consonant

clusters that contain many consonants at the same time Being not familiarwith this, Vietnamese students often delete one or more than one consonant in

a consonant cluster so that it will be easier for them to produce the sound

As formerly stated, the consonants cluster phenomenon is quite unfamiliar tothe Vietnamese language and hence complex, so teachers should expect to seeplenty of omissions, additions and substitutions occurring in words with [pr][pl] [tr] [kr] [kl] [fl] [ks] [sk] [st] [ts] combinations Teachers need to spend aconsiderable amount of time with the students to practice these sounds as theyaffect intelligibility dramatically

/pr/: problem; practice; pronunciation; present

/pl/: place; plough; plane; please; plumber

/tr/: try; train; trophy; trail; tricky; trace; trim

/kr/: crane; crab; crime; Kristen; cram; cradle

/kl/: climb; claim;

2.5.3 Stress, rhythm and intonation problems

As being mentioned in the previous part, Vietnamese is basicallymonosyllabic language, whereas English is a multi-syllabic language Moreover,

in an English multi-syllabic word, there must be a stressed syllable, which isvery different from Vietnamese Therefore, Vietnamese students often haveproblems with stress in English

Since Vietnamese learners often delete the final consonant in aconsonant cluster, they will not link the words together to make the rhythm ofthe sentence

Intonation is also a problem for Vietnamese students In a tonal languagelike Vietnamese, intonation plays very little role in changing the meaning of asentence Instead, we often use particles to change the meaning of a sentence,from a statement into a question or an exclamation Meanwhile in English,

intonation plays a very important role in changing the meaning of a sentence.With different intonation, the meaning of an utterance can change differently

In short, it can not be denied that pronunciation and teaching pronunciationare important parts to be concerned about in any language course It is evenmore important for those who are or will be teachers of the language Hence,

in this chapter great effort has been made in order to review related theories ofpronunciation learning and, more importantly, the differences between soundsystems of English and Vietnamese and common difficulties met by Vietnameselearners when learning English pronunciation Basing on such backgroundknowledge of the topic, the study would seek answer to the question whether the

11th graders s at Thanh Chuong High school meet the same difficulties or not

in the next chapters

CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

The research methodology was presented in the first chapter, theIntroduction In this chapter, it will be discussed in more details

3.1 Methodology

3.1.1 The research questions

The study was designed to seek the answer to the three followingquestions:

a Do students in Thanh Chuong 3 high school have difficulties inlearning English pronunciation?

b What are their main difficulties as perspected by the students?

c What may be the causes of these difficulties?

With these three research questions, the study will investigate Highschool students’ difficulties as well as the causes of these difficulties inlearning English pronunciation

3.1.2 Method orientation

As stated in the first chapter, to gain the aims with high reliability, theresearch employed different methods of case studies including interview andquestionnaires These methods were used to collect data from students inThanh Chuong 3 high school in Nghe An with the intention of addressingthe aims of the study and then analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively.According to Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991:14), both qualitative andquantitative paradigms are not competing but complementary and the choicebetween them is not necessary They mentioned that to gain the aims withhigh reliability, researchers should make a combination of these twoparadigms

Because the study was designed to investigate the situation in aparticular context, that is in Thanh Chuong 3 high school, the study was acase study.

3.1.3 The characteristics of a case study

First of all, some definitions of the term “case study” will be presented.Johnson (1992) defines that a case study is a study which focusesholistically on an entity In other words, a case study is a study whichinvolves a detailed exploration of a single instance of, or example of,something

As cited in Jaeger, (1988) by an unidentified student , a case study iswhat you call a case, in case, in case you don’t have anything else to call it”According to Smith, cited in Stake (1988), the definition of case study isambiguous However, the term “bounded system” defines the method for himGillham (2000:1) defines a case as:

 A unit of human activity embedded in the real world

 Which can only be studied or understood in context

 Which merges in with context so that precise boundaries are difficult

to define

Thus, a case study has some following characteristics Firstly, thecontext isn’t necessarily a cultural context It can be any context as long as thecontext is relevant to the research questions The second characteristic is that

it focuses on an individual In other words, case studies seek to investigateone single small group of subjects only It is concerned with thedocumentation and analysis of a single instance A case study, that is to say, isone which seeks the different kinds of evidence which there is in only onesetting, the case study Another characteristic is that it provides a portrait of

what going on in a setting (as cited in Dr Le Hung Tien’s lecture on

case-study research) In other words, the researcher taking a case case-study does notstart with a priorily theoretical notions and in case studies the continualrefining of hypothesis is not reflected Because he cannot know what theories

or explanations make the most sense until he gets in there and select the data,gets to understand the context and analyzes the datum McDonough &McDonough (1997:212) claim that “ teachers spend their working livesdealing in different ways with individuals, and they need to understand those

“cases”, not in the first instance to build theories and search for broaderpatterns, but to understand their learners’ behaviors’ learning styles, languagedevelopment , success, failures, attitudes, interest and motivation The fourthcharacteristic of a case study is that it can have objective and subjectiveaccounts of data According to McDonough & McDonough (1997:204), thestudy of cases is not only a qualitative undertaking, nor does it present aneither/or perspective in quantitative / qualitative terms Most of case study isquantitative because the weight of discussion on case study is on interpretiveapproach However, it depends on the size of scale trend to be qualitative orquantitative or both For example, when the researchers need to study largescale trends, cases will be usually selected on the basic of random samplingand the data submitted to statically analysis A case study is always selectedbecause it deals with a considerably current issue A case study focusesholistically on an entity However, each case selected may be a representativefor a general category

Because of these above characteristics, I decided to choose a case studyfor my research The problems at Thanh Chuong 3 high school may be, tosome extends, the same to those of many schools at remote areas in Vietnam.Furthermore, the aim of my research is to investigate the difficulties forstudents in Thanh Chuong 3 High when they learn English pronunciation and

to recommend some suggestions for teachers and learners to overcome thesedifficulties My case study has been done with below steps:

 Select the cases and determine data gathering and analysis techniques

 Prepare to collect the data

 Collect data in the field

 Evaluate and analyze the data

3.1.4 The participants

With the questionnaire and interview instruments, the participants are thestudents in two randomly selected classes They are both male and female.Among 100 respondents, 59 were female and 41 were male All of them are atgrade 11th and ?have been learning English for five years I chose these grade

11th students to be the participants of the study because, firstly, they have twoyears of working with textbook The 11th grade students also have more time

to deal with learning pronunciation Furthermore, the 11th grade students alsohave more time to help me get the data meanwhile the 12th ones are busypreparing for the graduation exams

These 100 students were chosen randomly with no criteria set before.With this random selection, I hope to receive the most reliable and honestdata from the questionnaires In the questionnaires, I explained that theiranswers would be anonymous and my aim at giving them the questionnairesare just to get the data for the research without any other aims

With the interview instrument, the participants were ten teachers ofEnglish at Thanh Chuong 3 high school Among them, there were nine femaleteachers and one male one They have been teaching at that school from 3 tothirteen years

3.1.5 The instruments

In order to obtain rich information, the study employs both questionnaires

and structured interview as research instruments The questions and interviewsare designed into investigate these main following categories:

- General attitude to learning English as well as speaking skill

- Students’ main difficulties in learning English pronunciation as experienced

or judgments Moreover, open questions also give the respondents chances toexpress more opinions individually Because of these above reasons, both twotypes of questionnaires were used to get the data

To get the data reliably and avoid problems such as respondents’shyness, the questionnaires were started with explains about its aims as well

as its respondent anonymity In order that the students had no pressure oftime, the time for returning the questions is one day Furthermore, all thequestions were written in Vietnamese so that they could be at their best tounderstand the questions and express their thoughts and ideas

The details in the questionnaires I passed to students are as below:

- Students’ general attitude towards learning English ( Q1)

- Students’ general attitude towards learning English pronunciation (Q2)

- Students’ awareness of the importance of learning English pronunciation(Q3)

- Do students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation exist ? andwhat are the difficulties? ( Q4)

- What are English vowels that can cause problems to the students? (Q5)

- What are English consonants that can cause problems to the students? (Q6)

- Are the students aware of the concepts of stress, intonation and rhythm? (Q7)

- Do students have difficulties with English stress? (Q8)

- Do students have difficulties with English rhythm?(Q9)

- Do students have difficulties with English intonation? (Q10)

3.1.5.2 Interview

Interview, as we know, is a very useful tool to get the data According toHopkins (cited in McDonough & McDonough (1997 :181), there are threeapplications of interview in classroom research The first application is tofocus on a specific aspect of classroom life in detail, the second is to getdiagnostic information, and the third is to improve the classroom climate.Nunan also gives more uses of interview instrument such as needsanalysis, program evaluation, individual case studies and mini- surveys

From these above uses of interview, we can see that with this study,using interview instrument is very suitable to be applied The questionnaireswere used to investigate students’ general attitude towards learning English,English pronunciation and students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation.This second instrument, the interview, was used to investigate whatdifficulties students meet when they learn English pronunciation This kind ofinstrument, in this case study, had better be applied to the teachers who are