English Intonation Errors made by Third Year Students at English Department, Chu Van An University

1 English Intonation: Errors made by Third Year Students at English Department, Chu Van An University Abstract: This is a study on common errors in English intonation unit made by Viet

1 English Intonation: Errors made by Third Year

Students at English Department,

Chu Van An University

Abstract: This is a study on common errors in English intonation unit made by Vietnamese

learners of English as a foreign language with a hope to help the students to improve their ability

of dividing utterances into intonation units and help the teachers of English acknowledge their students‟ difficulties in perceiving and producing tone units The participants of the study involve

20 third year majors at English Department, Chu Van An University The major source of data for the research came from three sets of instruments including the academic results, the intonation tasks, and the survey questionnaire The results indicated that third year students still faced numerous difficulties in speech division into word groups The problems they had were caused by both their mother tongue and the English intonation itself However, the complicacy of the foreign language item seemed to be far more problematic to Vietnamese learners Apart from that, a correlation between perceptive and productive ability and a close tie between learners‟ language proficiency and their intonation ability were investigated in the study The study also revealed that most of participants kept positive beliefs in learning intonation but not most of them had positive attitudes towards learning it due to its complicacy Many students wished to find solutions to their

problems in tonality and almost needed more exercises and activities from their teachers

Keywords: Ngôn ngữ; Tiếng Anh; Ngữ điệu

Content

PART A INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale of the study

Intonation is a helpful tool to achieve effective communication Intonation, however, is a fairly complicated subject It is the reason why both Vietnamese teachers and students pay very little attention

to intonation Thus, when it comes to speaking English, it is no surprise to find that many students sound monotonous This also prevents learners from comprehending spoken English From the teaching reality,

I have realized that my students encounter no few problems in speaking English rhythmically and intonationally They even find it difficult to pause correctly after word groups and more difficult to put the most prominent stress on the tonic syllable As a result, their speech is either jerky or monotonous or both Apart from that, I myself find my spoken English not as good as my written English Especially I do have a couple of difficulties with English intonation I am aware of the importance of English intonation Also, I have certain knowledge of English intonation However, the amount of knowledge I gained before

my post graduate course is not sufficient for me to feel confident about communicating in English With a hope that I can make some contributions to solving my own problems and my students‟ difficulties in

communicating in English, I choose the study on “English Intonation: Errors Made by Third Year

Students at English Department, Chu Van An University.”

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2 Scope of the study

The study will focus on the formation of intonation units – tonality and concentrates on a limited number

of 20 third year English majors of Chu Van An University

3 Aims of the study

The ultimate aim of this thesis is, to the possible extent within the findings established, to provide an account of the errors in English intonation commonly committed by third year students at Chu Van An University and on this basis, to facilitate the mentioned students in improving English intonation unit usage

4 Objectives of the study

 Detect common errors in relation to English intonation units made by Vietnamese EFL students;

 Find out the causes of these errors;

 Investigate the relationship between participants‟ perceptive and productive ability;

 Identify the correlation between third year students‟ language proficiency and their ability of

dividing speech into word groups;

 Explore learners‟ beliefs and attitudes towards learning English intonation as well as their

solutions to the problems they made with English intonation unit

5 Research Questions

To achieve the aims above, research questions are addressed

1 Common types of errors relating to English intonation

1.1 What are the common errors in dividing speech into tone units at the perception and production stage encountered by third year majors of English Department, Chu Van An University?

1.2 What factors cause errors of English tonality?

2 Do the learners‟ perceptive ability relate to their productive ability?

3 What is the correlation between the students‟ language proficiency and their ability of speech division into word groups?

4 Students‟ attitudes towards intonation learning and their solutions to problems?

4.1 What are students‟ beliefs and attitudes towards English intonation learning?

4.2 What do students do to resolve their own difficulties in learning intonation?

PART B DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1 LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 English Intonation

1.1.2 Tonality – Intonation Unit

1.1.2.1 Nature of tonality

Paul Tench (1996:31) considers tonality as the system in intonation that divides spoken discourse into its separate individual intonation units, each of which represents one unit of information The terms

“intonation unit” can be called by different names by different authors In the present study the terms like

“tone unit” (according to Roach), “tone group” (in the word of Halliday), “word group” (stated by

Tench), “sense group” (called by O‟ Connor), and “pause group” (in the view of Pennington) are used to

refer intonation unit

1.1.2.2 Identification of tonality

Halliday (quoted in Tench 1996:31) states that very often intonation units coincide with clauses Theoretically, neutral tonality can be founded on the basis that a single piece of information is handled in the grammar typically by a single clause, and in pronunciation by a single intonation unit However, in

3 spoken English, intonation units do not always coincide with whole clauses In such cases, marked tonality will count to identify intonation units Marked tonality occurs either when two (or more) clauses fit into a single intonation unit, or when two (or more) intonation units are needed to cover a single clause Of the two cases, the latter is much more frequently than the former To be more precise, tag questions, listed items, marked themes, long themes, final adverbs modifying meaning of the whole clause, initial and medical adjuncts have their own tone unit The case of two (or more) clauses fitting into a single unit can be found with report clause, negative domain, and when two transitive verbs have one object complement in common

1.1.3 Structure of intonation

Structure of intonation here is shown through structure of each intonation unit in an utterance According

to Paul Tench (1996:12), structure of an individual intonation unit consists of pre-tonic segment and tonic

or nucleus and tail Among those, the tonic is obligatory and the most prominent word; the head, pre-head and tail are optional

Tonic syllable is the most prominent syllable in an intonation unit Each intonation unit has one and only one tonic syllable The head extends from the first stressed syllable up to but not including the tonic syllable If there is no stressed syllable before the tonic syllable, there cannot be a head The pre-head is comprised of all the unstressed syllables in tone-unit preceding the first stressed syllable Any syllables between the tonic syllable and the end of the tone unit are called the tail

1.1.4 Errors in intonation

There is much that can go wrong in intonation However, the errors with tonality are the commonest An error of tonality can cause series of errors in tonicity and tone Therefore, if the teacher detects an error in intonation, he or she can check first with tonality then the tonicity and tone so as not to cause byproduct errors in tonicity and tone

Tonality errors emerge when learner utter the response as two intonation units instead of as one, or as one instead of as two

1.2 Contrastive analysis

Contrastive analysis (CA) is defined by James (1980: 3) as “a linguistic enterprise aimed at producing inverted (i.e contrastive, not comparative) two-valued typologies (a CA is always concerned with a pair of languages), and founded on the assumption that languages can be compared.”

1.2.1 Intonation unit

 English intonation unit normally is

associated with clauses Each clause

constructs an intonation unit

 Each intonation unit has one nucleus except

the case of dive tone

 Each intonation unit has one intonation

contour

 Vietnamese intonation unit operates in sentences Different types of sentences have different types of intonation

 Simple sentence has one nucleus while other kinds of sentences have 3 nucleuses

 Each intonation unit involves a series of falling and rising contours

Great difference exists not only in tonality system but also in its elements including stress, rhythm, pause, and pitch

1.2.2 Stress

 It is a key factor to discover the tonic

syllable which brings the most important

information in a given intonation unit

 Stress is weak because of the appearance of tones in all the words of utterance

1.2.3 Rhythm and pause

Rhythm and Pause in English Rhythm and Pause in Vietnamese

 English is foot-timing language Thus, the

rhythm is very strong and is a prominent

phenomenon

 The pause in English can happen anywhere

 Vietnamese is syllable-timing language

There is no rhythm group division or if there

is some, it is very weak

 The pause is used if there exists punctuation

 Pitch is associated with utterances and

affects meaning of the whole utterance

 Pitch variations don‟t form new words but

sentence meaning

 Variations in pitch can convey different

purposes of the speakers

 Pitch performs grammatical function

 Pitch is associated with syllables and changes meaning of individual syllable

 Pitch variations form new words

 Variations in pitch cannot express different purposes of the speakers

 Pitch variations perform lexical function

CHAPTER 2 METHODOLOGY 2.1 Error and error analysis

2.1.1 Definition of error

In this thesis, the researcher adopts Chaudon‟s definition In his view (1986: 66), errors are defined as

“linguistic forms or content that differed from native speaker norms or facts and any other behavior signaled by the teacher as needing improvement.” The researcher selected Received Pronunciation as the norm in the present study

2.1.2 Error Analysis

In the view of Corder (1967& 1974), error analysis is the study of the errors made by second language learners It provided a methodology for investigating learner language level He also identified a model for error analysis which included three stages:

the rules incompletely, or build up wrong hypothesis

2.2 Subjects

Participants of the study are 20 third year students (17 female and 3 male students) with the average age from 21 to 24 All are at English Department, Chu Van An University All of them are exposed to the same learning situation and teachers at university They have gone through a minimum of five years of English; three before college and two at college While in University they have taken credits of English language and literature including three in English phonetics and phonology that covered vowels, consonants, stress, rhythm and intonation

2.3 Instruments

2.3.1 The academic result

Refer to Appendix 6, this instrument was the academic results of first five semesters of the course In this kind of assessment, the students got 10% of the total mark from their regular attendance and active participation during the class hour, 30% from the mid-term examinations, and 60% from the end-of-term examination After being calculated according to the appropriate proportion, marks ranging from 1 to 10

5 were given for each individual subject of each student For the purpose of this study, only the results of the examinations for four English skills, general English, grammar, and phonetics and phonology were recorded

2.3.2 The Intonation tasks

As the main instrument to collect data on errors relating to English intonation units, a task with two stages

of perception and production was adopted in this research This is an extract from conversational pages,

Better English Pronunciation (O‟ Connor, 1980: 128)

There were 32 intonation units of all types In terms of the length of units, there were twelve short units, four medium units and sixteen long units According to the way of tonality division, there were 25 neutral units, which left only 7 marked ones including unit 3, 5, 8, 14, 18, 25and 30 Of all the three groups in term of length, it was a big potential for students to make errors of splitting with long units On the contrary, students by no mean split short units but might encounter the errors of joining them Another potential source of difficulties might be marked units

The perception task was employed to help assess the students‟ ability to recognize and comprehend system of intonation units in English The production task was designed to examine the students‟ ability

to produce utterances in real context with right pause after sense groups

2.4 Data Collection and Analysis Procedure

At the first stage, the results of the first five semester‟s achievement test were collected Scores of English subjects were averaged, and then were used to place the students into three groups of ability Then, one day of April 2011, 20 students were gathered in their lecture hall and were required firstly to do perception task With the perception task, they were asked to divide the utterances into tone units while listening to the tape three times After the perception task came to the production task At this stage, students had time to rehearse the dialogue until they felt confident enough to act out the conversation in pair twice After each time, players in each pair would change their roles of the two speakers of the dialogue Participants‟ role-playing was recorded onto a tape for later analysis The recordings were then carefully checked and converted by the researcher and two other teachers at Chu Van An University to detect errors in producing intonation units Based on the results from the handouts and the recordings, the researcher counted and categorized perceptive and productive errors related to intonation unit division later

When the task was completed, the researcher conducted a survey questionnaire (Appendix 5), which had been carefully designed and delivered to all the 20 participants The data collected from the instruments

were presented in tables and charts

2.5 Data Analysis

Both qualitative and quantitative methods are exploited in the research

Qualitative analysis: analyzing the participants’ recordings and handouts

Quantitative analysis: analyzing the questionnaire and academic results

2.5.1 Data obtained by the academic results

The participants‟ average marks ranged from 6.14 to 7.90 Two groups of high and mid ability were formed

(1) Mid ability students had the average marks ranging from 6.14 to 6.67

(2) High ability students had the average marks 7.14 to 7.90

2.5.2 Data obtained by the intonation task

6 The data on intonation unit division was analyzed on two main areas: error analysis and correlation investigation

The error analysis was based on the three main steps Within the first step of error identification, twenty handouts and recordings were marked according to the transcription The second step, errors classification, looked into: (1) Splitting errors at perception and production stage and (2) joining errors at the two stages Based on the errors found in the area, the third step - error explanation- further looked into the factors that caused the splitting and joining intonation units The causes were identified by studying the nature of the errors

The correlation was investigated first between perceptive and productive ability of tone unit division to discover how perceiving capacity supported producing ability, and second between learners‟ language proficiency and their intonation ability to make out whether students with higher scores at university can produce intonation unit better or not

2.5.3 Data obtained by the survey questionnaire

Each survey questionnaire was analyzed by the researcher to avoid any mistakes The frequency of the responses given by the students was in the form of tables and percentages Data from the survey helped the researcher to determine the proper suggestions to assist teachers and students in teaching and learning English intonation unit

CHAPTER 3 DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS

The handouts of the perception task and the recordings of the production task were marked according to

the keys on the conversation pages, Better English Pronunciation (O‟Conner, 1980: 128) One error was

counted wherever students had wrong division or joined more than one unit into one Therefore, there existed a fact that more than one error might appear in one unit The author counted the number the error appeared and classified them into types Otherwise, each correct division for one unit took one point The researcher would count the right tonality division then gave marks to every participant

3.1 Research question 1 – Error analysis

3.1.1 Research question 1.1 – Error identification and description

Various sorts of errors were committed by students The number of errors on the division of speech into tone units is fairly high, and they are categorized into 12 groups of errors (refer to appendix 0, table 06)

They were errors of joining short units (Js), joining closely grammatically connected units (Jc), splitting marked tonality at clause boundary without comma (Sbwc), splitting marked tonality at clause boundary with comma (Sbc), splitting tonality at the place of the stressed

syllables in the head (Shs), splitting

at the place of the unstressed

syllables in the head (Shu), splitting

tonality after the nucleus (Sn),

splitting tonality after the direct

object (So), splitting tonality at the

changing point in the dive (Sd),

splitting tonality after the subject

(Ss), splitting tonality after the

pre-head (Sp), splitting tonality at

unstressed syllables in the tail (Stu)

Sbwc

Sbc

Shs Shu Sn

So Js Jc Sd

Ss Sp Stu

Proportion of error types

3.1.2 Research Question 1.2 – Error explanation

What are the probable causes to the problems detected?

(Refer to appendix 0, table 07) The errors participants made with 32 units involve two types of errors namely the interlingual (17.7%) and the intralingual (82.3%), but the main causes are faulty hypothesis resulting in 35.4% errors in the total and over-generalization leading to 23.8% errors of the sum Then come to negative influence from the mother tongue which covers 17.1% of all errors made, and ignorance

of the rule restrictions which causes 14.7% of the total errors The least frequent source of errors is incomplete application of rules reaching to 8.4% of all It can be said that the influence of the mother tongue plays a little role in the division of utterances into intonation units The most important factor, however, lies in the tonality itself It, therefore, is more fundamental to pay attention to make clear intonation rules in order to help students acquire knowledge in the process of learning English intonation

7 Thus, it can be concluded that it is these errors that show the general characteristics of the students‟ learning how to divide speech into intonation units

3.2 Research Question 2

Does the learners’ perceptive ability relate to their productive ability? In both stages, students

seemed to have the same problems However, the number of students who encountered faults varied greatly in perceiving and producing tone units The frequency of order was not similar in the tasks In general, students have same difficulties with marked tone units composed by more than one clause Students tended to make more errors of splitting in producing tone units than in perceiving them However, with regard to the errors of joining short and closely grammatically connected units, it is a problem of perceiving sense groups

The participants have a better perceptive ability compared to the productive one but they are correlated to each other The better perceptive ability compared to the productive ability is demonstrated by the fact that students get more good marks, less errors at perception stage, and fewer students faced difficulties in perceiving tone units (Appendix 0, table 11, chart 03) The relation between the two abilities is proved by the data that of 15 students who got above the average and good marks with perception task, 13 students (representing 86.67%) attained the same ranges of grade with production task Thus, those who perceive tone units well will produce them well (Appendix 0, table 09)

in teaching intonation unit in particular Thus, a teacher should apply different types of activities and provide a wide range of exercises from easier levels to more difficult ones

Despite the better performance in producing tone units, quite a large number of high level students have problems with English tonality For this reason, it is definitely that the process to eliminate tonality errors among high ability students requires hardship and effort, let alone those in mid ability group It is both groups of students that are in need of great help from teachers for linguistic knowledge from structure of clause with more attention to clause types formed by di-transitive and complex-transitive verbs to rules of stress and rhythm with more explanations for strong form and weak form of words, and to tonality rules with special focus on marked tone units What‟s more, acquiring sufficient theoretical knowledge will turn out to be useless if students are out of practice Thus, together with equipping them theory, carefully planned exercises and activities should be provided

3.4 Research question 4

3.4.1 Students’ beliefs and attitudes towards learning English intonation

The statistic data shows students‟ positive belief in English intonation and English intonation learning Most of the participants find it important to learn intonation, and it is necessary to spend more time on intonation at university because intonation helps them not only to communicate successfully but also to represent themselves well in English More importantly, their future job requires that they should be good

at intonation

As shown in the following table, although most of them (90%) appreciate the important role of intonation, not most of them like learning it (60%) of students questioned assert that they like learning intonation because it is necessary Some of them (35%) believe learning intonation is interesting No one thinks learning intonation is easy Those who either do not like or do not mind learning intonation attribute their negative attitude to the complexity of English intonation itself (40% of the students) and the uneasiness in the way of teaching (30% of the participants) Only a small number of students (10%) think learning English is boring

3.4.2 Students’ reactions to their problems

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As a matter of fact, intonation is a complicated issue in the process of acquiring English, so it is understandable that all of participants face difficulties in learning intonation So as to overcome difficulties, the first way most students (55%) use is asking for help from their teachers 40% of the participants search material and practice themselves, some others (15%) ask for help from friends While 35% want to do something with tonality but do not know what to do and how to do, a few (10%) do nothing All mentioned data proved that many students wish to solve problems with tone units, so teachers should do more to provide help According to 90% of the participants, the most significant action

a teacher can take is providing students with activities and exercises to practice at class Two third of the participants asked emphasized the role of a teacher‟s listening to students and giving feedback Half of the students want their teachers to give lectures on intonation deeply and clearly and assign them exercises for homework practicing

PART C CONCLUSION

1 Summary of the thesis

Errors are obviously unavoidable in learning a foreign language, so error correction plays an essential role

in teaching a language, especially in teaching difficult language elements like intonation

The thesis is carried out with the aims at finding out common errors in dividing speech into tone units made by third year students at English Department, Chu Van An University and clarifying the causes to these errors Moreover, the thesis wishes to discover the relationship between participants‟ perceptive and productive ability of tonality to find effective ways to support students‟ competence in English tonality Also, investigating the correlation between learners‟ proficiency and their tonality capacity is another significant goal of the thesis to offer suitable tasks in need as possible suggestions to aid teachers in delivering lectures on tonality and on its elements

To achieve these aims, some literature review relating to the theme of the study is taken into consideration The study has been conducted with 20 third year students from Chu Van An University and three sets of instruments namely academic results, intonation tasks, and a survey questionnaire Data collected from these tools are analyzed, which help to answer all the research questions thoroughly The analysis reveals important findings that third year students still face numerous difficulties in speech division into word groups The problems they have are caused by both their mother tongue and the English intonation itself However, the complicacy of the foreign language item seems to be far more problematic to Vietnamese learners Apart from that, a correlation between perceptive and productive ability and a close tie between learners‟ language proficiency and their intonation ability are investigated

in the study

2 Concluding remarks

From what has been analyzed above, in this part I would like to draw some conclusions for the objectives set forth at the beginning as follow:

2.1 Concluding remarks on objective 1

My first objective is to detect common errors in relation to English intonation units made by third year majors at English department, Chu Van An University I think that this objectives is done successfully with 12 types of errors that students commonly encountered Of all the types, Sbwc, Sbc, Shs, and Shu are four most serious ones with the largest number of errors and the biggest number of students who made errors From the above most frequently met problems, it can be implicated that marked tonality comprised

of two clauses, stressed and unstressed syllables are attribute to the most problematic factors which hinder students from correctly dividing utterances into word groups

2.2 Concluding remarks on objective 2

Errors coexist with learning a language They are useful for learners, teachers and researchers as well Nonetheless, errors are taken advantage only when we acknowledge the core causes leading to them That

is the reason why the second objective of the study concerns the causes of these problems, which is tackled strictly with the most frequently sources of faults committed by the participants are false concepts hypothesized and over-generalization Having found out the underlined causes to the errors of tonality committed, implications emerge that English intonation unit alone is rather complicated for learners to acquire

9

2.3 Concluding remarks on objective 3

Having investigated the relationship between participants‟ ability to perceive and produce tone units, it is found that perceptual competence relatively affects producing capacity, which is stated in more details as follow (1) students tend to perceive tonality better than producing tonality

and (2) those who perceive tone units well will produce them well

2.4 Concluding remarks on objective 4

The next objective is to explore the relationship between third year students‟ language proficiency and their ability of dividing speech into word groups Participants were divided into two groups of ability, the high and the mid one Both groups had the same difficulties, and committed the same types of errors, but the degree of their problems was not the same Students with higher proficiency level performed better than lower ones, which was represented by the following details:

 Higher ability students face less difficulties than mid ability students

 Fewer high ability students made intonation errors than do the others

The mentioned facts provide the answer to our third research question That is speakers with higher English proficiency will have better tonality ability

2.5 Concluding remarks on objective 5

The final objective is to discover students‟ belief and attitudes towards English intonation and English intonation learning Data from the survey questionnaire indicates clearly that a majority of the participants are aware of the important role of learning English intonation in their process of acquiring the language and for the future career, and almost keep the positive attitude towards this issue However, not most of the students like learning English intonation since it is too difficult for them, so they are in need of teachers‟ help with both theoretical knowledge and practice exercises and activities

On the whole, the thesis has fulfilled its objectives of the study Although it cannot fully cover all the aspects and components of English intonation, I do hope that this thesis would be of some value for those interested in English intonation in general and English intonation unit in particular

So far, the errors found in the study have been discussed in much detail The causes of the errors have been found and explained clearly The relation between perceptive and productive, the correlation between language proficiency and tonality ability also have been discovered The findings of the study show that using English intonation is not easy any more for the third year students at English Department

of Chu Van An University In the elementary system of intonation only – tonality – numerous errors are detected The question raised here is how to teach students English intonation effectively Intonation is a vast topic, so this section will nevertheless have given some ideas to tackle intonation in the classroom, and some recommendations to help learners with tonality I hope that they will be useful enough for teachers and learners to deal with this problem

(1) Concerning the errors made in the intonation tasks and the causes of these errors, it is suggested that learners are in need of not only exercises and activities for further practice but also theoretical knowledge of English intonation unit As a result the teachers need to prepare for intonation lessons deliberately, so that they should be competent in approaches, techniques, and principles to teach English intonation (refer to appendix 7, 8 and 9) as well as prove their roles in the teaching process (appendix 10) In order to make the process of comprehending English intonation unit less hard, learners should be involved in lessons on components of a tone unit like stress, rhythm, and pause in advance And more attention and energy should be paid to these elements to make it easier for learners to acquire the language items During the process of lecturing, similarities and differences in intonation unit and in its components between the two languages are required to be handled too but in the form of warm up exercises to wake the awareness of the learners

(2) Regarding the importance of the perception ability to the production ability, it is demonstrated that they are related to each other to a certain extent Normally, students perceive intonation units better than producing, and those who perceive well tend to produce well In other words, perceptual ability plays a part in reinforcing the producing competence of tonality The relation between perceptive and productive ability recommends that if a teacher wishes to improve his students‟ ability to produce intonation unit, he firstly need to consolidate their ability to perceive tonality with sufficient theoretical knowledge However, being good at perceiving word groups is not enough, even helpless,

10 since good capacity for tonality requires more than that It is expected to produce tone units flowingly without any hesitation or pause in between The productive ability, nonetheless, involves much more effort and attention of the teachers to design suitable exercises and activities.

(3) Although the students learn in the same groups, their tonality ability is not homogenous This is due

to the differences in each person‟s language competence and his own background and learning environment Therefore, in teaching a group of students who are at different levels of language proficiency, different tasks should be assigned to these different levels to ensure that all of the students can practice For higher ability students, the requirements should be harder Also, constant attention should be paid to low ability students to give any instant help so that they can catch up with the higher ones

(4) Learners are well aware of the importance of English intonation in the daily conversation, but the time they are allowed to study this subject is extremely little compared to the time on English practical subjects I presume to think that English intonation should become a separate subject so that both teachers and students have more time to investigate the nature of English intonation deeply enough to become more and more successful communicators of English Moreover, it is rather complicated for students to acquire English intonation It is the complicacy of intonation that prevents the learners from being interested in learning English intonation in general and learning English intonation unit in particular Thus, teachers should facilitate them, enhance their confidence, and make sure that they feel relaxed when they learn intonation In this case, easy tasks at the beginning and game will count

4 Suggestions for further study

For further development of the topic of the present study, the following directions should be considered in the future research:

(1) The present study involved only a small sample size among third year students There is a need for a more representative sample to get a more comprehensive picture of the English major students‟ intonation ability

(2) This study mainly looked at errors committed with the elementary system of English intonation, tonality It is also essential to examine the two other systems namely tonicity and tone

(3) In order to discover underlined causes to errors relating to intonation, contrastive analysis between English and Vietnamese intonation is in need to help well predict students‟ errors

(4) Intonation is considered as a vast topic which includes many minor components A need is raised here

is that further researches on its elements as stress and rhythm should be conducted before hand

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Tench, P (1991) Pronunciation Skills, Essential language teaching series Macmillan Publisher Ltd

In Vietnamese

Chừ, Mai Ngọc (2007) Nhập môn Ngôn ngữ học Nxb Giáo dục

Kỷ, Nguyễn Huy (2006) Intonation by the Vietnamese Hà Nội: Nxb Văn hóa-Thông tin

Quang, Võ Đại (2009) Một số phương tiện biểu đạt nghĩa tình thái trong tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt Nxb

Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội

Thuật, Đoàn Thiện (1980) Ngữ âm tiếng Việt Hà Nội: Nxb Đại học và Trung học chuyên nghiệp Thắng, Đỗ Tiến (2009) Ngữ Điệu Tiếng Việt Sơ Khảo, Nxb Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội

III

APPENDIX Table 01: Types of Intonation Units

IV

Table 06: Types of errors made in two intonation tasks

errors

Percentag

e

1.2 Joining closely grammatically

connected units (Jc)

2.1 Splitting marked tonality at clause

boundary, without comma (Sbwc)

2.2 Splitting marked tonality at clause

boundary, with comma (Sbc)

2.3 Splitting tonality in the head, at the

place of the stressed syllables

(Shs)

2.4 Splitting in the head, at the place of

the unstressed syllables (Shu)

2.7 Splitting tonality at the changing

point in the dive (Sd)

2.8 Splitting tonality after subject (Ss) 23 5.65%

2.9 Splitting tonality after the pre-head

(Sp)

2.1

0

Splitting tonality at unstressed

syllables of tail (Stu)

V

Table 07: Probable Causes to Tonality Errors

(A) refers to over-generalization, (B) to ignorance of the rule restrictions, (C) to incomplete application of rule, and (D) to false concepts hypothesized

Error Types

Interferen

ce Errors

Intralingual Errors

Joining closely grammatically connected

Splitting marked tonality

at clause boundary, with

%

60 14.7

%

34 8.4

%

144 35.4

%

335 (82.3%)

Production Task Below 10

Table13: Errors Committed by Ability Groups Members

Participant Error of splitting Error of

12 11

6

14 12 18

3

Chart 03: Number of students making errors From the most to the least frequent in Perception task

Perception task Production task