Teaching pronunciation of english consonants by using contrasting and substituting techniques

ABSTRACT This study aims at testing how some teaching techniques used in the teaching of English consonant pronunciation at the School of Foreign Languages, Thai Nguyen University.. The

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

-

NGUYỄN VĂN TÂN

TEACHING PRONUNCIATION OF ENGLISH CONSONANTS BY USING CONTRASTING AND SUBSTITUTING TECHNIQUES

(Dạy phát âm các phụ âm tiếng Anh bằng việc sử dụng kỹ thuật đối chiếu và thay thế)

M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111

Hanoi, 2015

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

-

NGUYỄN VĂN TÂN

TEACHING PRONUNCIATION OF ENGLISH CONSONANTS BY USING CONTRASTING AND SUBSTITUTING TECHNIQUES

(Dạy phát âm các phụ âm tiếng Anh bằng việc sử dụng kỹ thuật đối chiếu và thay thế)

M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111

Supervisor: Dr NGUYỄN HUY KỶ

Hanoi, 2015

DECLARATION

I declare that my thesis entitled

TEACHING PRONUNCIATION OF ENGLISH CONSONANTS BY USING CONTRASTING AND SUBSTITUTING TECHNIQUES

is the result of my own research of the degree of Master of Arts at the University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi and this thesis fulfills with the requirements of the degree Master of Arts and has not been published anywhere

Nguyễn Văn Tân

2015

Supervisor’s signature

Dr NGUYỄN HUY KỶ

Finally, I wish to thank my parents and my family for their support and encouragement throughout my study

ABSTRACT This study aims at testing how some teaching techniques used in the teaching

of English consonant pronunciation at the School of Foreign Languages, Thai Nguyen University

There are two groups of students participating in the study The second group has access to the teaching techniques while they are learning the pronunciation of the target consonant sounds

A test is organized for the two groups after the teaching intervening step has finished This test tells how the students in the two groups pronounce the target consonant sounds

The study finds out whether the application of the techniques can improve the students’ pronunciation

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii

ABSTRACT iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS iv

LIST OF CHARTS vi

LIST OF TABLES vii

PART 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1 Background to the study 1

2 Objectives of the study 2

3 Research question 2

4 Scope of the study: 3

5 Methodology 3

6 Significance of the study 3

7 Organization of the study 4

PART 2: DEVELOPMENT 5

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 5

1.1 Brief overview of Vietnamese and English consonant sounds 5

1.1.1 Vietnamese consonant sounds 5

1.1.2 English consonant sounds 6

1.1.3 Brief comparison between Vietnamese consonant sounds and English ones 7

1.2 Review of some pronunciation teaching methods 8

1.3 Introduction of the contrasting and substituting techniques 11

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY 16

2.1 Participants 16

2.2 Data collection instruments 17

2.3 Procedures of data collection 17

2.3.1 The placement test 17

2.3.2 The intervention 18

2.3.3 The evaluation test 24

2.4 Procedure of data analysis 25

CHAPTER 3: RESULTS AND FINDINGS 26

3.1 Results of the placement test 26

3.2 Discussion of the placement test findings 28

3.3 Results of the evaluation test 31

3.4 Discussion of the results of the evaluation test 34

PART 3: CONCLUSIONS 39

1 Recapitulation of major findings 39

2 Concluding remarks 40

3 Limitations of the study 41

REFERENCES 43 APPENDIX I

LIST OF CHARTS

Diagram 1: Pronunciation errors from the results of the placement test Diagram 2: Pronunciation errors in group A in percentage

Diagram 3: Pronunciation errors in group B in percentage

Diagram 4: Pronunciation errors in the two groups in percentage

LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Vietnamese consonant sounds

Table 2: English consonant sounds

Table 3: Number of errors made by the students in group A

Table 4: Number of errors made by the students in group B

Table 5: Number of pronunciation errors made by the students in the two groups

PART 1: INTRODUCTION

1 Background to the study

Learning English has been a real need in Vietnam for more than two decades English is a compulsory foreign language subject at most levels of schools in the country Most of the aspects of the language are taught but not equally emphasized Pronunciation seems to receive less consideration in English teaching at secondary schools as well as at high schools than grammar and vocabulary As a result, the teaching of pronunciation sometimes does not reach its goal This study is carried out based on some inspiration found when the researcher taught pronunciation to first year students at Thai Nguyen University

Pronunciation plays an important role in learning a language People learn a language for many reasons, but the ultimate goal is to communicate and verbal communication is the most important form A clear pronunciation helps speakers understand one another better with less effort as well as avoid undesirable misunderstanding So, pronunciation acts as a communicational catalyst It is also a motivation for the learner to improve himself in mastering the language when he receives positive feedback from the listener

As a teacher teaching pronunciation to first year students, the researcher has experienced a variety of pronunciation errors made by students These mistakes do not only form a foreign accent when the students are speaking English, but it also makes them misunderstood sometimes

Recognizing the problem, the researcher decided to venture to use some Vietnamese consonant sounds to contrast to the target English consonant sounds which are being taught Vietnamese language can be a good support

for teachers in pronunciation teaching because Vietnamese and English consonant sound systems share some similarities and many distinctive differences For example, both Vietnamese and English have the alveolar voiceless plosive /t/, but there are some slight differences in the place of articulation as well as the quality of aspiration of the two sounds is not the same It may be a good idea in teaching pronunciation if the teacher can make use of the similarities and differences of the two consonant sound systems to help learners differentiate the sounds and master the pronunciation of the foreign sound Teachers of pronunciation, as observed, mainly depend on ready-made materials in text books and neglect some useful factors from the native language

This study was carried out to evaluate how some teaching techniques which use Vietnamese consonant sounds in teaching English sounds affect students’ pronunciation

2 Objectives of the study

The objectives of this study are to find out the most frequently mispronounced consonant sounds, and to evaluate the effectiveness of the contrasting and substituting techniques in improving students’ pronunciation

4 Scope of the study:

The study was set up at the School of Foreign Languages – Thai Nguyen University It focuses on applying some techniques in teaching pronunciation

of some English consonants which are normally problematic to first year students studying at the school

It was carried out with the participation of first year students at the school The consonant sounds which are used in this study are limited The English consonant sound system consists of 24 consonant sounds, so it is very difficult to include all those sounds in this research Therefore, the researcher only focuses on teaching the most frequently mispronounced consonant sounds made by the students at the school There are six consonant sounds included in this study

5 Methodology

This study employs the quasi-experimental design The participants are chosen randomly Tests are assigned before and after the intervention The data are collected for analysis

6 Significance of the study

The significance of this study is in the use of Vietnamese consonant sounds as

a supporting tool in teaching some English consonant sounds In this study, some English and Vietnamese consonant sounds are contrasted and substituted to help the participants (students) really get the essence of the English sounds Therefore they can have a better pronunciation of the English target sounds as well as avoid the negative transfer from the native language

to the second language

7 Organization of the study

This study consists of three main parts

Part 1 is the introduction This part provides the overview of the study

Part 2 is the development This part consist of 3 chapters

Chapter 1 is the literature review It provides an overview of pronunciation teaching as well as previous related studies It also presents the author’s framework

Chapter 2 deals with methodology It restates the research questions and describes the applied techniques, participants, data collection instrument, data collection procedure, and data analysis

Chapter 3 discusses the results and findings Major research findings and discussion are presented in details in this chapter

Part 3 is the conclusion; this part presents conclusions and implications of the study

PART 2: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW

In this chapter, some significant methods and approaches in pronunciation teaching are presented Also, there is a brief overview and comparison of English and Vietnamese consonant sounds Besides, the research framework

is also introduced

1.1 Brief overview of Vietnamese and English consonant sounds

1.1.1 Vietnamese consonant sounds

According to Đoàn Thiện Thuật (1999), Vietnamese language has 22 initial consonant sounds and 6 final consonant sounds These sounds are categorized

in the following chart:

Uvular Glottal straight twisted

(Extracted from Đoàn (1999: 153)

All these 22 consonant sounds can be in the syllable initial position Six of them which can appear in the syllable final position are /m/, /n/, / ŋ/, /p/, /t/, /k/

It is necessary to note that present Vietnamese language does not have any consonant cluster like /pl/, /st/, or /kl/ This makes it difficult for Vietnamese learners when studying a foreign language such as English

1.1.2 English consonant sounds

According to Roach, the classification of English consonant sounds are given

in the following chart (Roach, 2000)

English consonant phonemes are characterized by three major characteristics,

namely voicing, place of articulation, and manner of articulation

There are two more consonant sounds which are not listed in the table, which are the glottal plosive and the alveolar flap Both of the sounds are used as alternatives for the alveolar plosives

Most of the consonants can be in the initial, medial, and final position of a syllable

1.1.3 Brief comparison between Vietnamese consonant sounds and

English ones

After reviewing the consonant sounds in English and Vietnamese, the researcher proposes an overall grouping of English and Vietnamese consonant sounds

The first group consists of consonant sounds which are shared by both of the languages These consonant sounds are nearly identical in the two languages,

such as the nasals (/m/, /n/, /ŋ/), the labio-dental fricatives (/f/, /v/), etc

The second group consists of sounds which only appear in one language For

example, the uvular fricative voiceless / χ/ in words like khó khăn does not

exist in English; vice-versa, the English dental voiced fricative /ð/ is not a consonant sound in Vietnamese language, though it can sometimes be

produced by a few people as an alternative sound of /z/

The third group consists of consonant pairs which are made up of sounds appearing in the two languages with only some certain different feature The difference can come from the qualities of the sounds or the regional dialects For example, the English alveolar voiceless plosive /t/ differs from the Vietnamese /t/ in the quality of aspiration; the post-alveolar approximant /r/

appears in both Vietnamese and English, but the Vietnamese sound is sometimes pronounced with a slight vibration of the tongue tip, which is not a feature of the English sound /r/ The biggest difference existing between consonant sounds in English and Vietnamese is that the consonant sounds in English are pronounced when they are at the end of a syllable, which is a significant difference from Vietnamese final consonant sounds For example,

the final alveolar plosive sound of the word cut /kʌt/ is pronounced with the puff of air pushed out strongly, but the final sound of cắt in Vietnamese is

unexploded

Pronunciation problems come mainly from the consonant sounds in group two and three, i.e the sounds which do not exist in Vietnamese and the sounds which slightly differ from the Vietnamese equivalent sounds

1.2 Review of some pronunciation teaching methods

Pronunciation teaching has a long history and it has experienced different methods and approaches This part of only reviews three significant teaching methods which are related to the techniques applied in this study

The first recognizable method was Direct Method It first became popular in

the late 1800s and early 1900s This method uses students’ intuition and imitation to teach pronunciation Students are required to approximate the model of the teacher or a recording through imitation and repetition

“This instructional method was grounded on observations of children

learning their first language and of children and adults learning foreign languages in noninstructional settings” (Celce-Murcia et al, 1996, p.:3)

One of the most significant techniques that came from the period of the Direct

Method is listening and imitating In this technique, students listen to teacher

modeling then repeat and imitate it Nowadays, with the development of technology, tape recorders, video recorders, and language labs can be used as support to enhance this technique

The second significant trend in pronunciation teaching is the Reform Movement, which emerged in 1890s and was influenced by Henry Sweet, Wilhelm Vietor, and Paul Passy, who formed the International Phonetic Association and developed the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) The phoneticians supporting this movement advocated that:

 The spoken form of a language is primary and should be taught first

 The findings of phonetics should be applied to language teaching

 Teachers must have solid training in phonetics

 Learners should be given phonetics training to establish good speech

habits

As a result, phonetic training technique came to existence from the Reform

Movement It uses articulatory descriptions, articulatory diagrams, and a

phonetic alphabet to teach learners the mechanism of sound production and sound transcription

The third trend was Audiolingualism in the United States in the 1940s and

1950 This method emphasizes the importance of pronunciation and state that

it should be taught explicitly from the start It is similar to the Direct Method

in that the learner imitates the teacher’s modeled sounds However, there is a

remarkable technique in these methods which is the use of Minimal pair

drills – drills that use words that differ by a single sound in the same position

This technique is used for both listening practice and guided oral production

It is based on the concept stated by Bloomfield (1933) that a phoneme is a

minimally distinctive sound It normally begins with words and then move on

to sentence drills Some sample minimal pairs may be as followed:

Sentences: Don’t sit in that seat

Is that a black sheep? vs Is that a black ship?

This is one of the most commonly used activities in pronunciation teaching Using this activity, the teacher has students differentiate the sounds by

listening, i.e the teacher says two words (e.g., seat and sit) and has students

decide if the sounds are the same or different Then, the teacher should read a word from either list and asks students to identify which sound is being pronounced After the listening discrimination comes the guided oral production practice Students imitate teacher’s model to practice each list in isolation, then in contrast Finally, individual students are called on to read the lists without a model

In the 1960s, with the development of the Cognitive Approach, which was

influenced by Chomsky and Neisser and viewed language as governed behavior rather than habit formation, the role of pronunciation was

deemphasized The arguments for that were that native-like pronunciation was

an unrealistic objective and unachievable, and that time would be better spent

on teaching more learnable items, such as grammar and vocabulary

The 1970s witnessed the two significant pronunciation teaching methods,

namely the Silent Way and Community Language Learning The Silent Way

(Gattegno, 1972) pays attention to accuracy of both sound production and

structure production from the initial instructing stage Community Language

Learning is a method developed by Charles A Curran (1976) This method is

intuitive and imitative as in the Direct Method

When the Communicative Approach to language teaching came to popularity

in late 1970s, teachers decided that teaching suprasegmental features of language in a discourse context was the optimal way to organize a short-term

pronunciation course for nonnative speakers

Today, pronunciation teaching seeks to identify the most important aspects of both the segmental and suprasegmental features, and integrate them appropriately to meet every learner’s needs

1.3 Introduction of the contrasting and substituting techniques

Teaching pronunciation to Vietnamese learners is a challenging task In the teaching process, teachers may get different experiences, and they may have different ways of adaptation to the situation Based on researches and studies

on pronunciation teaching as well as classroom experiences, the researcher proposes contrasting and substituting techniques to solve some problems in pronunciation made by first year students at a specific language school

Vietnamese language shares almost the same letters in the English alphabet and the sounds represented by some of the letters sound quite similar to some

of the English sounds This causes a misconception in learning pronunciation

of the English sounds Some sounds are represented by the same letters but the ways they are pronounced are different The contrasting and substituting techniques focus on contrasting the different distinctive features of sounds in English and Vietnamese and highlighting the key features of the English target sounds so that learners can have the easiest way to access the desirable pronunciation

There are two stages in the application of the techniques In the first stage, the teacher chooses a Vietnamese equivalent sound to the English consonant sound being taught Then, the teacher contrasts the qualities of the two sounds, emphasizing the differences In the second stage, the teacher has students do some sound substituting drills

The process of applying the techniques should go through the following steps:

- The teacher introduces the sound being taught This step can be accomplished by using a recording tape

- The teacher explains the mechanism of producing the target sound

- The teacher has students pronounce the target sound This is a listening and repeating drill in which students have to imitate the model pronunciation

- The teacher contrasts the target sound with the Vietnamese equivalent

sound(s) A Vietnamese sound which has either similar pronunciation

and/or similar written representation is chosen to contrast with the English target sound The differences between the two sounds are

emphasized

- The teacher replaces the Vietnamese sound with the English target

sound in some Vietnamese words and requires students to pronounce

the words In substitution can make some nonsense words and they can

be funny too However, the main purpose is for the learners to get the

essence of the English sound

- The teacher has students practice English words containing the sound that is being taught

The techniques can be applied as a highlight in teaching English pronunciation only when there are pairs of English-Vietnamese equivalent sounds, such as the English /t/ and the Vietnamese /t/, or sounds which have the same written representation in English and Vietnamese, such as the

sounds spelled th in Vietnamese and in English

These techniques can make use of the strength of some previous approaches, such as listening and repeating of the Direct Method, the minimal pair drills

of Audiolingualism, the phonetic training of the Reform Movement

In the second step, the teacher provides students with a description of the mechanism to produce the target sound This is a distinctive feature of the phonetic training of the Reform Movement

In the third step of the technique implementation, the teacher provides pronunciation models of the target English sound and students imitate This is the significant feature of the Direct Method Learners have had access to the mechanism of how to pronounce the sound in the previous step and now they can apply what they have just learnt to pronounce it

In the next step, the teacher chooses a Vietnamese sound which is similar to the English sound being taught in either written form or spoken form and

helps students compare and contrast the sounds The differences are highlighted so that students who mispronounce the sound in the previous step can now see their problems

The next step is the biggest significance of the techniques implemented in this study The teacher picks some Vietnamese words containing the Vietnamese sound which is similar to the English sound being taught Then, the teacher creates new words by replacing the Vietnamese sound with the target English one This may make some nonsense words and may make students laugh But that is not a big deal in a pronunciation class When the students pronounce the newly-created words, the strange pronunciation helps them get the key

features of the English sound At this point, the teacher can make use of the

strength of Minimal pair drills Each pair consists of the original Vietnamese

word and the newly-created one Students are required to pronounce both

words of each pair Furthermore, these techniques can eliminate foreign

factors which may hinder the access to the true quality of the target sound As

mentioned in the previous part, different rules of combining sounds in English and Vietnamese may cause difficulties to Vietnamese learners Furthermore, surrounding sounds may also hinder the learner from acquiring the true quality of the target sound Even, sometimes learners are defeated by the surroundings sounds and fail to pronounce the target word Using these techniques, the target sound is isolated and put into the native linguistic environment of the learner There is no more hindrance from the neighboring sounds as well as no more foreign sound combinations Learners are given the

best option to get the real features of the sound

After the learners have accessed the essence of the target sound, it is brought back to its English language environment The teacher provides students with

some English words containing the target sound to practice their pronunciation

These techniques can limit the negative transfer According to the Contrastive

analysis hypothesis, the transference from the native language to the target

language is a significant factor in accounting for foreign accents Using these techniques, learners can see the true qualities of the target sound contrasted with those of the native sounds, and therefore reducing the negative transference

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY This chapter presents descriptions of the participants, the implementation of the techniques, the data collection instruments, and the procedures of data collection

2.1 Participants

The study has the participation of 40 first year students 11 of them are male and the other 29 are female They are from 18 to 20 years old They come from different provinces

They are studying English at the School of Foreign Languages, Thai Nguyen University Their English studying background may vary, but they all have had at least 5 years of learning English at high schools and secondary schools The studying of English in high school neglected the importance of pronunciation, so they speak English with a lot of pronunciation mistakes, especially the pronunciation of consonant sounds

The 40 students are chosen basing on a pretest This test is aimed at deciding the most commonly mispronounced consonants and choosing students to participate in the next step In the test, the participants are required to read out loud a wordlist Their pronunciation errors are noted by the examiner

First, 6 consonants which are mispronounced the most are selected for the study Then, 40 students who mispronounce the 6 consonants are chosen They are divided into two groups; each group consists of 20 students

This study also has the support of an American teacher He has been teaching

in Vietnam for more than 5 years, and he can speak a little Vietnamese He helps in the tests as an examiner

2.2 Data collection instruments

The study uses tests to collect data There are two tests in this research They are reproduced in the Appendix

The first test is assigned before the intervening teaching This test helps the teacher decide the most frequently mispronounced sounds which will be used

in the teaching step It also helps the teacher sort out the students who fail to pronounce the sounds

The second test is taken when the teaching has completed It aims at evaluating the progress made by students Particularly, the results of this test show a comparison between the progresses made by the students in each group From the results of the students in the two groups, the effectiveness of the techniques can be analyzed

All the tests are scored by the researcher with the help from the American teacher

2.3 Procedures of data collection

The data of this study are collected by using spoken tests, and there are three main steps in the procedure of data collection

2.3.1 The placement test

The first step in the data collecting procedure is to identify the most commonly mispronounced consonant sounds and choosing participants In order to accomplish these tasks, a placement test is used

100 students are chosen randomly to take the test These students are from 18

to 20 years old They are of both genders They are all freshmen at School of Foreign Languages, Thai Nguyen University They mainly come from rural

and mountainous areas, except a small number coming from urban areas like Hanoi or Thai Nguyen City They have at least five years learning English at secondary schools and high schools

The content of this test consists of a wordlist which covers the consonants in the group 2 and 3 which was mentioned in the earlier parts of this study During the test, the students are required to read out loud the wordlist one time The examiners underline the mispronounced sound made by the students when listening to them

Then, the pronunciation errors are counted and analyzed to identify the most frequently mispronounced sounds There are six sounds chosen for the study, which are the final /t/, /θ/, /ð/, /ʃ/, /ʤ/, /j/ Also, 40 students who make the frequently mispronounced sounds are chosen to participate in the intervention step

2.3.2 The intervention

The second step is to intervene in the teaching process by implementing the techniques

The 40 chosen students are divided into two groups called group A and group

B Each group consists of 20 students The teacher uses different teaching methods to teach the target sounds to the two groups

The target sounds of the teaching intervention are final /t/, /θ/, /ð/, /ʃ/, /ʤ/, /j/ With each group, there are two class meeting sessions in this intervention for teaching, 2 other meeting sessions for reviewing, and one more meeting for the evaluation test Each teaching session lasts for 40 minutes The first three