INCORPORATING BASIC PHONETIC KNOWLEDGE INTO TEACHING SPEAKINH AT lehongphong HIGH SCHOOL

it is the dominant international language in communications, science, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomacy....” Aspects of connected speech hereafter reduced to ACS belong to the

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One: INTRODUCTION 2

1.1 Background and rationale 2

1.2 Aims of the study 2

1.3 Significance of the study 3

Chapter Two: METHODOLOGY 4

2.1Study setting 4

2.2 Participants 4

2.3 Empirical teaching of ACS 4

2.3.1 The practice of ACS 4

2.3.1.1 Preparation stage 4

2.3.1.1.1 Material selection 4

2.3.1.1.2 Activities for teaching ACS 4

2.3.1.2 The teaching of ACS in practice 6

2.3.1.3 Pre-test and post-test 7

2.3.2 Evaluative instruments 7

2.4 Analytical framework 7

Chapter Three: DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION 8

3.1 Results from the diagnostic test 8

3.1.1 Problems with rhythm 8

3.1.2 Problems with assimilation 8

3.1.3 Problems with elision 9

3.1.4 Problems with linking 9

3.2 Results from the achievement test(the Post-test) 10

Chapter Four: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS 13

4.1 Conclusion 13

4.2 Recommendations for applying ACS 14

4.2.1 The practitioners of ACS and teachers of English 14

4.2.2 Educational administrators 14

4.3 Strategies for teaching ACS 15

4.3.1 Strategies for teaching rhythm 15

4.3.2 Strategies for teaching linking 15

4.3.3 Strategies for teaching assimilation and elision 16

4.4 5.4 Suggestions for further study 17

REFERENCES 18

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background of the study

It is common knowledge that English has become an international language and in Vietnam especially, it is nowadays considered crucial to job-seekers and scholarship hunters, as well as pursuers of higher education Thus, more and more students are taking international tests such as TOEFL and IELTS to find educational opportunities at overseas universities, and the TOEIC certificate is presently required by many Vietnamese universities as a necessary condition for graduation It is not just the matter of compulsory document that counts; a great number of Vietnamese people are learning how to better communicate in English because the 21th century is the era of globalization, in which English is the common language for most interactions, as stated by James (2001): “English

is the language of globalization, of international business, politics It is the language of computers and the Internet it is the dominant international language in communications, science, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomacy ”

Aspects of connected speech (hereafter reduced to ACS) belong to the supra-segmental sphere of phonetics and phonology which includes various issues, namely

rhythm, assimilation, elision, and linking All of them exert a certain impact on the

learner’s oral communication because their object is language in action and the interrelation between words in a sentence and even between sentences Notwithstanding such significance, these items have so far not been given commensurate recognition both from teachers and students at a high school level Here arises a question about whether it is possible to make the foreign language learning situation at high schools better through the introduction of basic knowledge about distinctive aspects of connected speech and whether the target students can incorporate this knowledge with their rudimentary command of segmental phonetics to achieve success in real-life communication The course of finding the answer to this question thus gives reason for the being of this study

1.2 Aim of the study

Aspects of connected speech are too large a subject to study in full detail together with its pedagogical application within the limit of a research Therefore, the researcher would hereby certify that only basic features of the aspects of connected speech that help to improve learners’ oral communication will be examined

With the scope defined above, the thesis aims at finding out the problems related to ACS faced by the students when they take part in authentic communication situations The researcher would, through this study, also like to investigate if the educational values of ACS can help the students better their oral communication, and assert the fact that aspects

of connected speech should be introduced at a high school level to improve the students’ oral skill

1.3 Significance of the study

The notion of bringing parts of the supra-segmental features, i.e ACS, into the teaching of English at high schools in Vietnam in general and at Le Hong Phong High School in particular has never been officially reported, so this research may complement the current practice of teaching and learning English at such educational institutions

The study is intended for the advance of the students in oral communication It can, therefore, be hailed as a contribution to changing the viewpoints on teaching the oral skill, which hopefully bears fruit in reaching the standard of natural English

CHAPTER 2 METHODOLOGY

In order to fulfill the aims of this study and come up with the answers to the research questions introduced in Chapter 1, the following methods are employed to carry out the study

2.1 Study setting

The study was conducted at Le Hong Phong High School for the pupils in Thanh Hoa Province The school’s main targets are to train excellent students for the annual national exams and to teach them toward the university entrance exams so that they can stand a better chance of getting a place in the universities of their choice With these targets in mind, both teachers and students have to work hard together and the quality of teaching and learning at the school has been very good according to the ranking of the Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training

2.2 Participants

The study was carried out with 82 participants from the two classes 10A2 English-major and 10A6, literature-English-majored aged 16, who had been learning English intensively for a year These students were introduced to ACS after taking the pre-test with a view to discovering the progress made in their oral communication

2.3 Empirical application of ACS

2.3.1 The practice of ACS

The practice of ACS consists of 2 stages, namely preparation and implementation The preparation stage revolves around the tasks of choosing the materials for introducing ACS to the students and creating the attractive activities to help them acquire ACS at their best The second stage, implementation focuses on reviewing the practicality of teaching ACS at Le Hong Phong High School

2.3.1.1 Preparation stage

2.3.1.1.1 Material selection

This is the first year (2014) when the new text book English 10, obviously designed to target communicative proficiency, is brought into its experimental stage Meritoriously, Le Hong Phong High school has been teaching this well-tailored material

It is, therefore, convenient to utilise the speaking-skill sections of the book to introduce ACS

2.3.1.1.2 Activities for teaching ACS

The activities for teaching ACS were selected and adapted from the those recommended by Celce-Murcia et al (1996, pp 8-9) However, only appropriate activities were used in the class because the researcher reckoned that it was beneficial to focus on some specific drills rather than applying too many kinds of them, which might result in the students’ distraction from the points being taught

Some of the in-class activities are described in details in the table below

Activities Aims Group

work

Preparatio n

Procedure

Listen

and

Imitate

- Help acquaint the

students with the

rhythmic pattern of

English as well as

other ACS

- Help teacher keep

track of students’

performance and

detect any problems

encountered by

them

- The whole class repeat in chorus, then students drill individuall

y

- The tasks adapted from the book and the videos downloade

d from Youtube

- Let students watch the videos or listen to the recording then ask them

to repeat after the voice they hear

- Teacher explains further with the theories of ACS

- Students practice by themselves and then present in front of the class

Speed

dictation

- Enhance students’

recognition of the

sounds

- Give students an

opportunity to be

exposed to natural

English

- Work in group

- Choose the suitable videos or recordings

- Ask students to group themselves to compete against other groups in the class

- Hand out pieces of paper for them to write down what they hear

- Teacher decides the winner by comparing the students’ result with the reading

Back-chaining

- Familiarize the

students with ACS

such as linking,

elision and rhythm

- In groups or individuall y

- Prepare the back-chaining sentences

at home

- Ask students to repeat in chorus

- Call on some students to repeat individually

- Ask for volunteer to repeat the long back-chaining sentences using ACS

Jumbled

pictures

- Help students use

English naturally

through story-telling

- Enhance

teamwork spirit and

the students’

creativity in using

- In groups

- Make photocopie

s of the pictures

- Prepare handouts

of

- Divide the students into

6 groups

- Assign 2 groups the same pictures of the same stories and ask them to rearrange the pictures to make a logical story

language suggested

stories

- Ask a representative from each group to tell their story to the class

“The

Pursuit of

words”

game

- Help students

practice ACS with

fun

- Improve students’

natural reaction in

using ACS

- In groups

or individuall

y

- Prepare pictures of different themes with ideas

or words hidden in them

- Prepare gifts for the winners

- Put the students into groups

- Explain the rules of the game to the students

- Ask the students to study the pictures carefully in

20 seconds and then speak out the words, phrases, or sentences the pictures suggest

Act it

out!

- To improve

students’ oral

fluency by using

ACS

- Give students more

drills on ACS

- In groups

- Prepare handouts

of short conversatio

ns involving two or more speakers

- Instruct students to act out the conversation using ACS

- Choosing a board of judges to decide the winner

2.3.1.2 The teaching of ACS in practice

The knowledge of ACS was introduced to the students for a duration of 8 fourty-five-minute periods The prominent characteristics of the instruction of ACS are summarized as follows

At the very start of the academic year, the objectives of and rationale for introducing ACS were clarified to the students so that they could be prepared for attending the experimental teaching that would come later The teacher and researcher then set out to prepare the prerequisites for teaching ACS such as the lesson plans, the suitable activities, and teaching aids before embarking on guiding the students to obtain ACS As for the activities employed for teaching ACS, the researcher adapted the techniques and games as reviewed by Kelly (2000) and Celce-Murcia et al (1996) which

were discussed earlier in the previous chapter Those activities include chaining, role-playing, miming, listening and imitating, using visual aids, etc The selection of specific

techniques and activities was largely based on the researcher’s teaching experience and was clearly stated in the sample lesson plan

2.3.2 Evaluative instruments

The instruments that the researcher employed to sort out the results of the value of ACS were a pre- and post-test

2.3.2.1 Pre-test and post-test

In order to test the students’ performance in oral communication in association with ACS, a pre-test was designed based on the foundation laid out in Chapter 2 A set of twelve sentences was formed substantializing the different aspects of connected speech For the convenience of analysis, the test was put into 4 parts The first three sentences were supposed to test the students on rhythm, the next three on assimilation, then on elision, and the last three on linking

The post-test was actually the same as the pre-test to ensure the uniformity of the results collected so that the progress made could be clearly affirmed

2.4 Analytical framework

Quantitative analysis of pre- and post-tests

To determine the extent of progress made by the students in using ACS to better their oral communication after experimental teaching, a detailed analysis of the test was carried out The expected results from the scores gained by the students were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) of version 16.0 Firstly, it calculated the mean score of each part as well as the total score of the pre- and post-test Then a paired samples t-test was run to analyze any statistical difference in the mean gains between the pre- and post-test Some relevant statistical values such as standard deviation, degrees of freedom (d.f.), and Sig were also included to give evidence to the researcher’s conclusion of the students’ improvement in oral communication

CHAPTER 3 DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

This chapter analyzes and discusses the students’ results as obtained from the pre-test and post-pre-tests’ scores The analysis and discussion of findings chapter serves to discover the students’ difficulties in using ACS in communication and to find out the best approach to help them effectively learn to use ACS in oral communication naturally

3.1 Results from the diagnostic test (Pre-test)

The test consisted of 12 questions covering all four aspects of connected speech surveyed

in the study It required the students to read the model sentences in a way as natural as possible to the best of their ability Therefore, this section is further split up into the four themes closely following these aspects of connected speech: rhythm, assimilation, elision, and linking They will be presented in turn in the following four sub-sections

3.1.1 Problems with rhythm

Amongst the 45 testees, a substantial number of 31 students that accounted for 68.9% scored good points (little or no problem) in the first three questions regarding rhythm This is followed by a less crowded group of 14 students (31.1%) who exposed the sole problem of not lending proper weight to different words in a sentence These students had a few problems with syllable-timed rhythm; they, however, had difficulty dealing with stress-timed rhythm and seemed to treat every word with equal importance resulting in the monotonous and non-rhythmic speech The data collected are presented in the following table

Problems

Rhythm

Students’ problems with rhythm

3.1.2 Problems with assimilation

The next three questions of the test were engineered for judging the students’

performance related to assimilation The researcher noticed a stark contrast to the

favorable result obtained from analyzing the first three questions, which was presented in the chart below

Students’ problems with assimilation

The chart clearly manifests the lack of knowledge of ACS in casual oral communication All the respondents, as expected, could not handle regressive and coalescent assimilation; thus the output received revealed their unnaturalness in actual speech The only part of assimilation that the students proved to have no difficulty acquiring was to pronounce sequences of sibilant or stop consonants with only 8.9% failing to satisfy the examiner

3.1.3 Problems with elision

The third part of the test looked into the students’ difficulty with elision Among the 34 test-takers, almost none showed serious problems in elision of weak vowels and /v/ in /əv/, but up to 64.4% underwent a hard time pronouncing consonant clusters They tended to pronounce all the consonants clearly, which makes their speech awkward and adversely affects fluency The table below summarizes the statistics discussed above

Type of problems

Elision

Students’ problems with elision

The figures suggest a telling sign of great difficulties faced by students when they deal with consonant clusters As Loc (2008) asserts, there are no cases of three consonants standing one after another in a word in Vietnamese (i.e the students’ mother tongue); therefore, it causes a real hindrance to students’ acquisition of this aspect

3.1.4 Problems with linking

The final test items served the researcher’s purpose of finding out the students’ trouble associated with linking sounds in English While the students reported in their questionnaires that they were familiar with linking, in practice many a problem were pinpointed Out of the 45 participants, more than a half (53.3%) did not link ending consonants to vowels in their speech The results were even more appalling as far as

other linking techniques were concerned No single testee utilized glides in cases of two

vowels standing one after another, and the same situation applied to the case of

intrusive /r/ The data for these questions are visualized as follows.

Students’ use of linking techniques

To sum up, the results of the pre-test brought to light the fact that the students did not have an adequate knowledge of ACS and they could not effectively apply what they assumingly had known in real life practice of producing natural speech

3.2 Results from the achievement test (Post-test)

After 4 weeks (with a total of 8 forty-five-minute periods) of reviewing the knowledge of ACS, the students took the test again and the results were analyzed against those of the pre-test

so that the researcher could assess the progress made by the students by comparing the two The statistics are illustrated in the following table:

Post-test 11.1% 24.4% 11.1% 4.4% 2.2% 17.7% 13.3% 62.2% 71.1%

Table 4.3: Students’ results of the two tests

Legends for the nine problems as shown in the table above are explained right below: