Improving pronunciation for grade 10 students by using phonetic transcription an action research project in a high school in hai duong

Hanoi - 2019 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES PHƯƠNG THỊ THẢO IMPROVING PRONUNCIATION FOR GRADE-10

Hanoi - 2019

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

PHƯƠNG THỊ THẢO

IMPROVING PRONUNCIATION FOR GRADE-10 STUDENTS

BY USING PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION: AN ACTION RESEARCH

PROJECT IN A HIGH SCHOOL IN HAI DUONG

(Cải thiện phát âm cho học sinh lớp 10 bằng việc sử dụng kí hiệu phiên âm: Nghiên cứu hành động tại một trường trung học phổ thông ở Hải Dương)

M.A MINOR PROGRAM THESIS

Field: Teaching English Methodology Code: 8140231.01

Hanoi - 2019

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

PHƯƠNG THỊ THẢO

IMPROVING PRONUNCIATION FOR GRADE 10 STUDENTS

BY USING PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION: AN ACTION RESEARCH

PROJECT IN A HIGH SCHOOL IN HAI DUONG

(Cải thiện phát âm cho học sinh lớp 10 bằng việc sử dụng kí hiệu phiên âm: Nghiên cứu hành động tại một trường trung học phổ thông ở Hải Dương)

M.A MINOR PROGRAM THESIS

Field: Teaching English Methodology Code: 8140231.01

Supervisor: Hoang Thi Xuan Hoa, PhD

DECLARATION

I hereby declare that this research report is my own unaided work It is being submitted for the Master Degree of English Language Teaching, University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi It has not been submitted to any other degree or examination at any other university

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the following people for their contribution

to this study

Dr.Hoang Thi Xuan Hoa, my research supervisor, for her valuable guidance,

commitment and support

Ms Duong Thi Loan and Ms Nguyen Thu Thao, for their support and care, which helped me through many difficulties

My parents and my two beloved sisters for a great source of inspiration and

encouragement which help me to achieve my goals throughout my years of study The teacher and the students participating in my study, for their time, assistance and enthusiasm

ABSTRACT

This action research aims to improve the pronunciation of vowel sounds for high school students by using phonetic transcription In order to achieve the aim, the study identified the mistakes in vowel sounds made by the students through pre-test and pre-questionnaire and then implemented a plan to help the students improve such mistakes using phonetic transcription Finally, the study evaluated the improvement of the students after applying the technique by employing post- tests, questionnaire and teacher‘s journal The findings of the study revealed that the students made a certain progress in pronouncing vowel sounds after learning with phonetic transcription They also showed a positive attitude towards the use of phonetic transcription in pronunciation learning and wished to receive further training using this technique

Keywords: phonetic transcription, vowel sounds, high school students, action

research

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION i

LIST OF FIGURES vi

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1 Rationale of the study 1

2 Research aim 3

3 Research questions 3

4 Scope of the study 4

5 Methods of the study 4

6 Design of the thesis 4

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 6

2.1 Pronunciation 6

2.1.1 Definition of pronunciation 6

1.1.2 Definition of vowel sounds 6

2.2 Phonetic transcription 9

2.2.1 Definition of phonetic transcription 9

2.2.2 The benefits of phonetic transciption in pronunciation learning 9

2.3 Teaching pronunciation 10

2.3.1 The aim of teaching pronunciation 10

2.3.2 Techniques in teaching pronunciation 11

2.3.3 The difficulties in pronouncing vowels and using phonetic transcription of the students 13

2.4 Related studies 15

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 18

3.1 Research design 18

3.2 The subjects of the study 20

3.3 Data collection instruments 21

3.3.1 Pre-test and post-test 21

3.3.2 Pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire 22

3.3.3 Teacher‘s journal 23

3.4 Data collection and analysis 23

CHAPTER 4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 25

4.1 The mistakes and difficulties of students in pronouncing vowel sounds 25

4.2 The improvements of students after learning with phonetic transcription 32

4.3 The opinions of the students after learning with phonetic transcription 36

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 40

5.1 A summary of the major findings 40

5.2 Implications of the study 41

5.3 Limitations of the study 41

5.4 Recommendations for further study 42

REFERENCES 43 APPENDICES I

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1:Table lists of English vowels ( Kelly, 2000) 8 Figure 2: Sound Foundations (Under Hill, 1994) 9 Figure 3: The percentage of students making mistakes in each vowel sound in the pre-test 26 Figure 4: The difficulties of the students in pronouncing vowel sounds and phonetic transcription 28 Figure 5: Reasons for the students‘ difficulties in pronunciation 30 Figure 6: The comparision between the results in the pre-test and post-test 33 Figure 7: Students‘ opinion about their improvements after learning with phonetic transcription 36 Figure 8: Students‘opinions about learning with phonetic transcription 37

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

This chapter presents the rationale of the study including the theoretical and practical basis for the study, current teaching situation and reasons for applying phonetic transcription into teaching pronunciation in this action research Besides, the chapter also includes the research aim, research questions, scope of the study, methods of the study as well as the design of the thesis

1 Rationale of the study

Teaching and learning English for the communication purpose has become a trend and an indispensable necessity in education since English plays a more and more significant role as a means of global integration Pronunciation has been an integral part in learning a language, as Derwing and Munro (2005) assert that

―Having a good pronunciation of the language can help in normal communication, particularly intelligibility‖ Learners with good pronunciation in English are more likely to be understood even if they make errors in other areas (Adult Migrant English Program Research Centre, 2002) Kelly (2000) also states that pronunciation is the key to speaking and adds that the consistency in mispronouncing phonemes can be extremely difficult for other speakers from another language to understand This can be very frustrating for learners who may have a good command of grammar and lexis but have difficulty in understanding and being understood by native speakers It is estimated that the majority of the breakdowns in communication in English is due to pronunciation problems (Jenkins, 2000)

In the history of English teaching and learning, the practice has gradually shifted from grammar- translation approach to communicative approach whose ultimate goal is to develop students‘ productive skills In other words, it aims to helping students use the language to communicate rather than acquiring pure language knowledge To be more specific, students are required to take part in more and more activities relating to productive features such as presentation, discussions

and debates rather than just dealing with grammar and vocabulary drills as before

In addition, students have to take speaking tests besides paper tests at the end of each semester Obviously, speaking skills in general and pronunciation skills in particular play a more crucial role in assessments This circumstance requires more efforts and attentions of both teachers and learners towards pronunciation skills in teaching and learning

During the teaching practice at my current education institution, I have observed and noticed that pronunciation is one of the weakest skills of the students

in compared to reading, listening skills and other language competent like grammar

or vocabulary One of the most obvious mistakes by my students is that they often mispronounced English vowel sounds To be more specific, they either misrecognized one vowel sound for another, especially the ones which are pronounced They are assumed to be caused by one of the following reasons First, English‘s feature is an unphonetic language which presents in the inconsistency in the relationship between spellings and sounds in English That causes a huge confusion for learners whose mother tongue does not bear that feature Second, there are some similarities between two vowel systems – English and Vietnamese Therefore, the Vietnamese learners often carry alternatives to the closet pure vowel

in pronouncing pure vowels in English in many cases (Honey,1987) This obviously causes mistakes since most of the English vowel sounds are virtually different from their Vietnamese counterparts A minor difference in length of vowel or tongue, lip positions can lead to the change of a vowel sound into another, the change in the meaning of words and consequently, miscommunication occurring

In order to help the students improve their pronunciation, I intended to apply phonetic transcription into teaching pronunciation for the students This technique has been long used in pronunciation teaching and learning that may help to students avoid mistakes in their pronunciation In phonetic transcription, each symbol stands for one sound and one only In other words, the phonetic transcription is symbolized

as a bridge between the spellings and the sounds that help students overcome any

confusion and misunderstanding It thus allows students to see the correct pronunciation of an English vowel of phrase without the confusing influence of any abnormalities in instructors‘ speech In addition to that, it provides a reliable, ideal model towards which students can work in their pronunciation independently Along with this idea, Hesselwood (2013) also stated that phonetic transcription could represent clearly the sounds we have heard, because one symbol is one sound

It could avoid the ambiguity of the similar sounds heard by the listeners This feature could help to solve the problem of being unphonetic of English Lintunen (2004) concluded in his research that phonetic transcription was good to help Slovenian students study pronunciation The students made fewer errors after knowing the symbols of the sounds

From all above rationales, I decided to implement using phonetic transcription to improve students‘ pronunciation improvements in terms of vowel sounds for the students and evaluate the students‘ improvements after six weeks of the study

2 Research aim

The research aim is to improve of students‘ pronunciation skills using phonetic transcription In order to achieve the aim, the study followed these following steps: identifying difficulties of the students in pronouncing vowel sounds, planning the action, implementing the action and evaluating the improvements of the students after using phonetic transcription In addition to that, the study also investigates the students‘ opinion about the use of phonetic transcription in pronunciation learning

3 Research questions

Being drawn from the research aim, the main research questions that need to

be answered over the study are:

1 To what extent was the students‘ pronunciation improved after learning with phonetic transcription?

2 What were the students‘opinions of the use of phonetic transcription in

pronunciation training ?

4 Scope of the study

The study was conducted to a class of thirty nine grade-ten students at a high school in Hai Duong during the first six weeks of the second semester The research subject was the improvement of the students in pronouncing vowel sounds after learning with phonetic transcription during six weeks

5 Methods of the study

The study used the method of classroom action research Action research into education setting is defined that ―action research is a form of self-reflective inquiry that can utilized by teachers in order to improve the rationality and justice of (1) their own practices, (2) their understanding of these practices and (3) the situations in which these practices are carried out (Kemmis and Carr,1986) This nature of action research meets the intention and the aim of the study that is to improve the students‘ pronunciation of vowel sounds using phonetic transcription

A variety of forms of action research have evolved (Carr & Kemmis, 1986; Ferrance, 2000; Basuki, 2016) which adapt a methodical, iterative approach embracing problem identification, action planning, implementation and evaluation The insights gained from the initial cycle feed into planning of the second cycle, for which the action plan is modified and the research process repeated However, within the limit of this study, the researcher carried out one cycle only and followed all main steps including identifying the problem, planning the action, implementing the action and evaluating the action Data of the study was collected by means of questionnaire, tests and teacher‘s journal

6 Design of the thesis

The thesis is composed of five chapters as follow:

Chapter One is Introduction mentioning rationales of the study, the research aim, the research questions, the scope of the study, the method of the study, the design of the thesis

Chapter Two is Literature review which mentions the definition of pronunciation, definition of vowel sounds, definition of phonetic transcription and

its benefits in pronunciation learning, aims in teaching pronunciation, common difficulties in teaching pronunciation and techniques in teaching pronunciation and related studies

Chapter Three is Research methodology which consists of research setting, research design, research subjects, data collection instruments, data collection procedure and data analysis procedure

Chapter Four is Findings and discussion In this part, data is analyzed collected from pre-test and post-test, pre- and post-questionnaire and teacher‘s journal to evaluate improvements of students after using phonetic transcription and their opinion about the applying of phonetic transcription

Chapter Five is Conclusion which summarizes the major findings of the study and presents the implication and the limitations of the study as well as recommendations for further studies

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

In this chapter, the study presents the definition of pronunciation in general, the definition of vowel sounds as well as its classification Besides, the chapter also includes the definition of phonetic transcription and the benefits of using phonetic transcription in pronunciation teaching and learning proved through the results of a number of studies In addition, this chapter mentions the aim of teaching pronunciation, the difficulties in pronouncing vowels, techniques in teaching pronunciation Last but not least, the study discusses some related studies to bring out more theoretical and practical background for the thesis

2.1 Pronunciation

2.1.1 Definition of pronunciation

Cook (1996) defined pronunciation as the production of English sounds Pronunciation is learnt by repeating sounds and correcting them when produced inaccurately When learners start learning pronunciation they make new habits and overcome the difficulties resulting from the first language According to Otlowski (1998), pronunciation is the way of uttering a word in an accepted manner Adult Migrant English Programe Research Centre (2002) gives a broad definition of pronunciation as ―pronunciation refers to the production of sounds that we use to make meaning It includes attention to the particular sounds of a language (segments), aspects of speech beyond the level of the individual sound, such as intonation, phrasing, stress, timing, rhythm (suprasegmental aspects), how the voice

is projected (voice quality) and, in its broadest definition, attention to gestures and expressions that are closely related to the way we speak a language‖ However, within the scope of this study, the concept of the pronunciation mentioned mainly refers to the production of particular sounds in a language system To be more specific, they are vowel sounds in English

1.1.2 Definition of vowel sounds

Vowel sounds belong to segmental features in the system A vowel is seen as the class of sound which makes the least blocks to the air flow Vowels are nearly ever located at the centre of a syllable, and it uncommon to locate any sound other than a vowel which is able to stand alone as a whole syllable (Roach, 1992) Each vowel has a number of features that realizes it from other vowel sounds These comprise; the shape of the lips, which could be rounded, neutral, or spread The second feature is the position of the tongue, which may be front, middle, or back Finally, the tongue may be raised giving different vowel Kelly (2002) stated that vowels are produced when the airstream is voiced through the vibration of the vocal cords in the larynx, and then shaped using the tongue and the lips to modify the overall shape of the mouth

Vowels are usually described in terms of:

 Length, although remember that length depends on stress and that even short vowels in English may seem rather long when stressed

 The position in the mouth in which they are made (in terms of their position from high to low and front to back)

 The degree to which the lips are rounded, spread or neutral Basically, the vowel sounds in English are divided into single vowels and diphthongs Single vowels or pure vowels have been divided up into categories

 For close vowels the tongue is quite high in the mouth Moving from /i:/ to /u:/; we also notice the different positions of the tongue; /i:/ is a front vowel, and /u:/ is a back vowel There are four close vowels /i:/, /i/, /u:/ and /ʊ/

 For mid vowels the tongue is neither high nor low in the mouth Moving from /e/ through to /ɔː/, we also notice the different positions of the tongue;

/e/ is a front vowel, and /ɔː/ is a back vowel There are four mid vowels /e/, /ə/, /ɜː/ and /ɔː/

 For open vowels, the tongue is low in the mouth Moving from /æ/ through

to /ɒ/,we also notice the difference positions of the tongue, /æ/ is a front

vowel, and /ɒ/ is a back vowel There are four open vowels including /æ/, /ʌ/, /ɑː/ and /ɒ/

Kelly (2000) defined a diphthong as ―a combination of vowel sounds‖ A slightly closer analysis shows us that there is a glide (or movement of the tongue, lips and jaw) from one pure sound to another The first sound in each phoneme is longer and louder than the second in English, but not in all languages If we listen to the word ―house‖, we can hear that the /a/ part of the sound is longer than the final part /ʊ/ If you are trying making the /ʊ/ part longer, you will hear the difference English is usually described as having eight diphthongs, and they can be usefully grouped in the following ways

 Centring dipthongs ends with a glide towards /ə/ They are calling centring because /ə/ is a central vowel There are three centring diphthongs including /ɪə/, /ʊə/, /eə/

 Closing diphthongs end with a glide towards /i/ or towards /ʊ/ The glide is towards a higher position in the mouth There are five closing diphthongs including /ei/, /oi/, /ai/, /əʊ/ and /aʊ/

The table below gives example of 12 single vowels and 8 diphthongs in English along with an example word for each sound

Figure 1:Table lists of English vowels ( Kelly, 2000)

2.2 Teaching pronunciation

2.2.1 The aim of teaching pronunciation

The growth in the use of English, together with the ease of communication worldwide, means that English is increasingly being used as a medium of communication between speakers for whom it is not a first language (Kelly, 2000) With the communicative paradigm, it has been recognized that the goal of getting foreign language learners to have perfect pronunciation may be inrealistic and

inappropriate (Jenkins, 1998) Instead, it has been suggested that the goal in

teaching pronunciation should be ― intelligibility‖ (Kenworthy, 1987)

Kenworthy (1987) defined intelligibility as the stituation when our speaking

is being understood by a listenner at a given time in a given situation Furthermore, Burns (2003) stated that intelligibility exists when speakers produce sound patterns that are recognizable as English However, these term do not actually point out which features of English pronunciation need to be learned in order to attain this intelligibility With this problem in mind, Jenner (1989) attempted to determine ― what all native speakers of all verieties have in common, which enables them to communicate effectively with native speakers of varieties other than their own‖ The results of his analysis were brought together in the Common Core, which is a list of the features of English pronunication which Jenner considered is essential for intelligibility anywhere in the world One of the seven essential areas to eliminate errors in learner‘s pronunciation is vowel quantity among which the length of a vowel is the matter However, the length differences between the vowels of English feature in all accents, and the long English vowels are very long in comparison with average vowel lengths in other languages Because of this, the distinction between long and short vowels is more important than exact vowel quality, and should be clear in speech

2.2.2 Techniques in teaching pronunciation

One of the main ways in which pronunciation is practiced in the classroom is through drilling In its most basic form, drilling simply involves the teacher saying a word or structure, and getting the class to repeat it (Kelly, 2000) The technique has its roots in behaviorist psychological theory and ―audio-lingual‖ approaches to teaching; these are both now largely consigned to history, though drilling has stayed with us as a tried and tested classroom technique Drilling aims to help students achieve better pronunciation of language items, and to help them remember new items This is a crucial part of classroom pronunciation work, and is possibly the time in the lesson when students are most reliant on the teacher The teacher‘s main role in drilling is that of providing a model of the words, phrases for students to

copy Therefore, this method relies heavily on how precisely a teacher pronounces a word or phrase and the ability to perceive and imitate correctly of students However, when applied in a big class with forty students or more, this technique may appear to be less useful because teachers may not pronounce loud and clear enough for students to listen to and imitate In addition, big class size may prevent teachers from getting the correct responses from students as they often pronounce chorally As the result, they cannot figure out which students get corrected pronunciation and who do not

Reading aloud is another popular classroom activity which has fallen in and out of favour with teachers at various time The main argument against it is that it can interfere with successful pronunciation; spellings can clearly affect pronunciation performance adversely (Kelly, 2000) This problem is also discussed above, as it frequently happens in languages that share Latin letters in the alphabet What‘s more, this kind of practicing activities can be rather time-consuming, so teachers can only help some students in a lesson The others who do not have chance to read out loud the text and get corrected from the teacher may have very little benefits or none at all from this kind of activity

Taping students‘ English is one of the techniques employed by many second language learners including me Taping learner‘s spoken English from time to time can pay dividends Tapes can be made while students are engaged in language practice activities and used for all manner of language difficulties, but especially those concerned with pronunciation Besides, taping can also be done by students themselves as a kind of homework or individual speaking task Students might tackle the same task on two occasions, the tape of the first ―attempt‖ providing the basis for pronunciation work; the subsequent performance of the task will hopefully

be more successful, and the two attempts can then be contrasted This technique can help students solve their specific problems and target the correct mistakes instead However, it requires a lot of time and efforts of teachers to listen, give comments, and then listen the later version to check the improvement of the students This is

quite impractical in the current teaching situation of the researcher since the class size is about 40 students meaning a huge amount of work that need to be processed

One of the techniques that has been used widely among non-native EFL speakers is phonetic transcription using the English phonetic chart (44 sounds) which is based on the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) As mentioned previously, one of the greatest advantages of phonetic transcription is that each phonetic symbol presents an exact sound in English By mastering these sounds, English learners can learn to pronounce any English words properly without being doubt about its correctness Since English is not phonetic which means a letter or a cluster can be pronounced differently in different cases, it presents a huge obstacle for learners to be certain if they pronounce a word correctly, especially in a non- native speaking environment when there is a lack of native speakers available to help them correct their mistakes What‘s more, phonetic transcription is likely to be very beneficial for learners who are accustomed to a close phoneme-grapheme correspondence in their native language when they want to learn a language with more complicated grapheme-to-phoneme rules (Lintunen,2004) By learning phonetic transcription, learners form a correct relationship between spelling and actual sounds rather than basing on the orthography to pronounce an English word Learning through phonetic transcription can also help students to avoid the ambiguity of the similar sounds (Hensselwood,2013), especially when this ambiguity is more and more serious in a typical crowded classroom or by unqualified instructors Therefore the use of these phonetic symbols and phonetic transcription can be seen as an effective and reliable method to help student improve their pronunciation

2.2.3 The difficulties in pronouncing vowels and using phonetic transcription of the students

One of the significant problems faced by students of English in general and Vietnamese students in particular is that each English vowel sound has more than just one way of pronunciation This causes many difficulties to learners and leads

them to a mispronunciation (Cruttenden, 1994) A typically cited example is the

pronunciation of ―ough”, which has at least eight distinct sound patterns attached to

it such as cough /kɒf/, bough /baʊ/, rough /rʌf/, although /ɔːlˈðəʊ/, through /θruː/, bought /bɔːt/ , thorough /ˈθʌr.ə/, lough /lɒk/ This can be really challenging to ones who are at low competence level of English

One of the greatest factors that may influence the pronunciation of vowel sounds of Vietnamese learners is their mother tongue vowel system As Honey (1987) stated, "the highly complex Vietnamese vowel system possesses eleven pure vowels (/a/, /ă/, /â/, /o/, /ô/, /ơ/, /e/, /ê/, /u/, /ư/, and /i/) and many more diphthongs and tripthongs " In general, most of Vietnamese vowels are free of positions, which mean that they can stand-alone Some, however, cannot People can usually recognize Vietnamese diphthongs and trip-thongs by the spelling Also, according

to Honey, there are some similarities between the two vowel systems English and Vietnamese Both English and Vietnamese employ Latin alphabet in which they

share five main single vowels in common a, e, i, o, u and diphthongs like oa, ai, au,

ia The Vietnamese learners who do not have sufficient pronunciation knowledge of

the vowels in English may shift them to the way they normally pronounce in Vietnamese Honey (1987) stated that the Vietnamese language often caries alternatives to the closest pure vowel in pronouncing the pure vowel in English Moreover, the relationship between the orthography and the phonology in Vietnamese is quite phonetic Each letter represents one sound only, so students can easily pronounce a word from a written word just by looking at it In contrast, the sounds of spoken English do not match up, a lot of time, with the letters of written English In addition to that, many words in English have silent letters, which are not pronounced Obviously, this causes a lot of difficulties for Vietnamese learners of English The learners who do not have the mastery of pronunciation of English words, often pronounce them just by looking at their spelling are expected to mispronounce many times (O‘ Connor, 2003) Vietnamese speakers, consequently, face a large number of problems when speaking in English

Another important factor in vowel section that causes problems for Vietnamese speakers is the confusion between the long and short vowel sounds in English (Nguyen, 2015) The distinction between tense and lax vowel pairs of English almost always creates problem Many Vietnamese learners of English cannot pronounce the two vowels of each pair correctly These authors figure out that second language learners could pronounce "neither the tense nor the lax vowel, but a vowel between the two Failure to make these distinctions can lead to misunderstandings‖ (Avery and Ehrlich,1992)

2.3 Phonetic transcription

2.3.1 Definition of phonetic transcription

Phonetic transcription is nothing more than a written record of the sounds of

a spoken language The relationship between phonetic transcription and spoken language is very similar to that between a printed musical score and a musical performance (Anthony, 2019) The International Phonetic Alphabet symbols (IPA)

is the most widely used alphabet for phonetic transcription The IPA was founded as early as in 1886 by English and French language teachers, and as the study of speech and phonetics has progressed, the amount of symbols required to express speech and sounds for different language has also increased (Morris-Wilson, 2004) The IPA has hundreds of symbols but only fifty or so- corresponding to the number

of sounds used in English- are necessary for transcription of English In IPA system, one phonetic symbol is used for each sound There are variations of phonemic chart, reduced from IPA for English language learners However, one of the most common phonemic charts is one developed by UnderHill (1994) It is also the one that the author often employs during her teaching practice in class

Figure 2: Sound Foundations (Under Hill, 1994) 2.3.2 The benefits of phonetic transcription in pronunciation learning

Phonetic transcription has been long used in pronunciation teaching and learning as it offers a great number of benefits to language learners Learning phonetic transcription is essential when acquiring foreign language pronunciation as

it gives a point of reference for the learners It is particurlaly useful for learners studying a language with weak letter-to-phoneme correspondence and ambiguous spelling such as English (Terguieff, 2012) Although various pronunciation rules exist in English, they are often complicated and many exceptions occur Therefore,

it is necessary to learn how to read phonetic transcription, as it will become a useful skill when learning new words from dictionaries (Wells, 1996) Acquiring skill is growing more and more important in a non-native learning environment like in Vietnam where you can mainly rely on standard dictionaries, reliable Internet sources and qualified teachers for correct pronunciation It also allows pronunciation teaching to move away from traditional teacher-centric teaching towards a more independent way of learning pronunciation of learners

Learning phonetic transcription also increase learner‘s phonemic awareness and the accuracy of speech It will help learners notice the distinction between the two entirely different sound systems (Morris-Wilson, 2004) This is especially essential for Vietnamese learners since Vietnamese and English both employ Latin letters and symbols in their alphabet That is why Vietnamese learners often mispronounce many English words as the spelling of the letters in Vietnamese often draws reader‘s attention away from the actual pronunciation of the ones in English Incorrect perception of sounds is the cause of many pronunciation difficulties, and phonemic transcription is a good method of analytically perceiving and correcting mistakes received imperfectly by ear

2.4 Related studies

Ahasana El (2018) conducted a descriptive research which describes in detail the class activities in teaching pronunication with phonetic transcription It was implemented during the even semester of 2017/2018 academic year in English phonology class There were six meetings observed and described in this research The first and the second meetings were the introduction of phonetic and IPA It made students accustomed to the symbols The next meetings were the practices of pronunciaton with phonetic transcription at word and then sentence level The

author observed, recorded and analyzed students‘ performance during the research The finding was that phonetic transcription could help students to correct their pronunciation Also phonetic transcription was concluded to help teachers simplify the teaching of pronunciation Much time would be saved and students were in focus with the phonetic transcription instead of getting bored like in drilling or ― repeat-after-me‖ method

Lintunen and Mompean (2015) in their research stated that using phonetic transcription in English classes was potential to remedy the pronunciation of the English learners It could give positive impacts for the correction of students‘ pronunciation, further more with good pronunciation students in Finland could be more confident to practice their English although they were EFL The study also revealed that Finish students were enthusiastic to study with phonetic transcription

It was because they liked and curious about how the English symbols were and how

the sounds produced The phonetic transcription could help students remember the symbol then pronounce words better than just knowing word‘s orthography and imitating to teacher It was in line with the finding of the research made by Ahasana

El (2018)

Another research by Ma (2016) examined the effectiveness of using Internation Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as a teaching tool in improving the English vowels produced by the Japanese preschoolers aged 4 and 5 Ten lessons were given in attempt to address their common weakness at pronouncing English back vowels including /ɒ/, /ɔ:/, /ʊ/, /u:/ in monosyllabic words IPA was used

to teaonunciation in the experimental group, whereas the children of a control group are given the common teaching practice by using spelling The result showed the improvements of back vowels in the majority of IPA group, while the decent changes in the spelling group were relatively minimal

From all these above related studies, it could be concluded that the benefits

of employing phonetic transcription in pronunciation teaching have been proved in numerous studies from different backgrounds and regions However, it seems that studies relating to the employments of phonetic transcription in teaching pronunciation in Vietnam have not been conducted Although, the issue of English pronunciation has received considerable attention from Vietnamese researchers so far, a number of studies virtually all focus on the phonological aspects of languages (see Hoa, (1965); Tam (2005); Nguyen, 2007) and few, if any, can be found on other pedagogical aspects This presents a gap in the field of pronunciation teaching and learning for Vietnamese students and motivates me to carry out this action research

In conclusion, this chapter presented the definition of pronunciation in general, the definition of vowel sounds as well as its classification Besides, the chapter also included the definition of phonetic transcription and the benefits of using phonetic transcription in pronunciation teaching and learning proved through the results of a number of studies In addition, this chapter clarified the aim of

teaching pronunciation, techniques in teaching pronunciation as well as the difficulties in pronouncing vowels and using phonetic transcriptions of the students Last but not least, the study discussed some related studies to bring out more theoretical and practical background for the thesis

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

In this chapter, the study presents the research design including the research method as well as detailed steps to carry out the research Besides, the chapter also includes details about the subject of the study, the instruments to collect the data for the research including the pre-questionnaire, the post-questionnaire, the pre-test, the post-test and the teacher‘s journal during six training sessions Last but not least, the study describes the process of collecting and analyzing the data

3.1 Research design

The research design that was used in this research was Classroom Action Research According to Lewin (1946) who was credited with the development of the idea of action research, action research is a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action, using ―spiral step‖, each of which is ―composed of a circle planning, action and fact-finding about the result

of action‖ It is also a form of ―self-reflective inquiry undertaken by participants

in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own practices, their understanding of these practices and situations in which the practice was carried out‖ (Kemmis, 1986) Action research is truly understood as ―learning

by doing‖, namely a group of people encounter a problem; they do something to resolve it ; they then evaluate how successful their efforts are and if they are not satisfied with the result, they can try it again (O‘Brien, 2001)

There are many models of action research developed over the time One of them was the one suggested by Ferrance (2000) This model included five main steps namely identifying problem, gathering data, interpreting data, acting on evidence, evaluating results and then repeating a new cycle Another classroom action research model including two phrases introduced by Basuki (2016) included two phrases The first one is preliminary study to identify the real problems occuring in class Then research cycle is carried out including planning, acting, observing and reflecting It can be noticed that although they are different action

research models, they share some common steps as principles in an action research Adapted from two above models, the researcher decided to follow four main steps for this action research including identifying the problem, planning the action, implementing the action and finally evaluating the action To be more specific, each step was carried out in the research as follow:

Step 1: Identify the problem

The mistakes were noticed initially by the researcher during her teaching practice In order to identify the level of mistakes more specifically, the researcher employed a pre-test to investigating mistakes of the students in pronouncing the vowel sounds and a pre-questionnaire to get a comprehensive picture about the mistake

Step 2: Plan the action

Using information from the previous parts, I then designed a plan of action to improve the students‘pronunciation using phonetic transcription for six weeks In total, there were 18 sessions over 6 weeks each of which lasted for 45 minutes (Appendix 7) The teacher followed Present- Practice- Produce approach to help the students learn and practice and produce targeted vowel sounds The teacher first presented and illustrated the targeted sounds using model videos in the course book

―Work on your accent‖ by Hellen Ashton and Sarah Shepherd In the video, the speaker will model the sound along with describing visually how to shape tongue, lips, mouth to make the sound properly In case the students do not understand the instruction, the teacher are available to help The students learned to recognize the symbol of the sound and knew how to pronounce them properly Then the teacher provided words that contained the targeted sounds for the students to practice Finally, the students tried

to identify targeted sounds themselves in sentences or paragraphs During the whole lesson, the teacher observed students‘ difficulties in practicing vowel sounds and their progress then took note in teacher‘s journal

Step 3: Implementing the action

The action was carried out for six weeks from the 22nd week to the 27th

10D The lessons took place in the extra classes approved and organized by the school‘s authority

Step 4: Evaluate the action

The researcher then collected the data from post- test, post- questionnaire as well as teacher‘s journal during teaching practice to answer the two research questions: (1) To what extent was the students‘ pronunciation improved in pronouncing vowel sounds after learning with phonetic transcription and (2) What were the students‘ opinions about the use of phonetic transcription in learning pronunciation The data then were processed and analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative method

3.2 The subject of the study

The research was planned to conduct over 39 grade-10 students (17 males and 23 females) in a class at a highschool in Hai Duong The school was located on Pha Lai ward, Chi Linh district, Hai Duong province The students started learning English in grade 3 and up to now, they have been learning English for 8 years in total Their English level was supposed to be at A2 level However, their actual English competence is worse than that The mainstream textbook that the students were studying is ―English 10 New Curriculum – the second semester‖ published by Vietnam Education Publishing House in cooperating with Pearson, Longman The textbook had 5 units from unit 6 to unit 10 Each unit was divided into 8 smaller sections including getting started, language, reading, speaking, listening, writing, communicationa and culture, looking back and project The pronunciation section took up a moderate part in the language and looking back session According to the curriculum of English 10, the pronunciation part focused on teaching clusters such

as / tr/, /br/, /kr/, /pl/,/est/, eit/ and word stress The teaching of vowels has not been included in the syllabus of the English 10 yet However, as it was stated previously that this aspect was one of the most problematic and urgent problems to address, it was necessary to spend time working on this aspect and fixing the mistakes for students first before moving to other parts However, the amount of

time for pronunciation learning in official class hours was not enough for teaching and learning pronunciation thoroughly, especially when the class size was huge, thirty nine students Therefore, the teacher decided to make use of time in extra lessons equivalent to three 45- minute sessions a week The class was organized and monitored by the school‘s authority

3.3 Data collection instruments

In order to collect the data for analysis, the researcher employed both qualitative and quantitative methods including a pre- and a post-test (both in oral form), pre- and post- questionnaire as well as the teacher‘s journal

3.3.1 Pre-test and post-test

The pre-test and post-test were designed to measure the level of making mistakes in vowel sounds of the students They answered for the questions such as ― Which vowel sounds did the students make mistakes the most?‖, ―Which vowel sounds did they make mistakes the least ?‖,― Which sounds did they get improved after learning with phonetic transcription ?‖.Besides, during the marking process, the evaluators noted down in detail about the students‘mistakes to see what kind of mistakes did they often make with targeted vowel sounds

The pre-test was delivered to the students at the beginning of the research with the aim of measuring the level of making mistakes in vowel sounds of the students The pre-test included two parts in which part 1 required students to read out loud 20 individual words and part 2 required students to read out loud three sentences containing targeted sounds All the words and the sentences in the pre-test were taken from their mainstream textbook published by the Vietnam Education Publishing House in cooperation with Pearson The words and the sentences were carefully picked out with the view to covering all twenty vowel sounds in English However, as the researcher adopted sentences from the book to stick tightly to the students‘ learning curriculum, it was difficult to balance the equal numbers among sounds in a sentence In other sounds, many sounds might appear twice in the test while others were tested one only Because of a limited amount of time for

conducting the tests as well as a considerable number of the participants, the number of test items was kept quite moderately which might influence to the validity of the tests‘ result The post-test was designed in similar form but employed different words from the pre-test It was worthy to note that both the pre-test and post-test were carried out in the spoken form and the students‘ performances were recorded individually each time The results were later marked by two independent evaluators One is the researcher and the other is an experienced teacher whose

English competence is at C1 level currently teaching at the same school (see in the

pre-test in Appendix 1)

3.3.2 Pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire

The pre- questionnaire and post- questionnaire were designed by the researcher to get a general understanding about the difficulties of the students dealing with the vowel sounds and phonetic transcription as well as their opinions about their improvements after learning with phonetic transcription during six weeks The questionnaires used Likert scales five levels from strongly agree to strongly disagree for each statement The pre-questionnaire was delivered to students to investigate the difficulties of students in pronouncing vowel sounds and phonetic transcription before the study and reasons for such difficulties The pre- questionnaire was divided into two sections Section A focused on the question

―Which difficulties did students often encounter in pronouncing vowel sounds and phonetic transcription ?‖ The students were asked to choose from ―always‖ to

―never‖ for each statement suggested in the section Besides, students could add more opinions that were not suggested in the questionnaire Section B aimed to figure out ―What might be the reasons for the students‘difficulties in pronouncing vowel sounds and phonetic transcription?‖ Students were asked to circle the number from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) in Likert scale The post- questionnaires were delivered to the students with the aim of gathering students‘ opinion about improvements that they felt after using the method and the use of phonetic transcription The questionnaire included two sections: section A-

Improvements the students have achieved after learning with phonetic transcription and section B – The students‘opinion about the use of phonetic transcription in pronunciation learning Each section was designed using Likert scales five levels from strongly agree to strongly disagree like in the pre-test The students could also

add more information outside the questionnaire (See Post-test in Appendix 2 )

3.3.3 Teacher’s journal

To collect qualitative data for the research, the researcher also did a teacher‘s journal during six weeks of the research The teacher‘s journal provided detailed description about the students‘ progression and the engagements of students in learning activities It answered for the questions such as ―How did the students progress during the practice?, ―What kind of mistakes did they often make?‖,

― Which sounds did they find hard or easy to improve?‖ (See Teacher’s journal in

Appendix 9)

3.4 Data collection and analysis

Both pre-test and post-test were taken orally Then the students‘individual performances were recorded individually by an online recording software The student who completed the test was asked to leave the room right after the test and must not leak out any information about the test to other students The tests were listened carefully and analyzed mistakes by two different markers In order to increase the accuracy of the test result and limit the subjectivity of the evaluation The statistics were then calculated to figure out the average point, min, max The results of the pre-test and post-test were compared to measure the improvements made by the students The results were then presented in line charts

The questionnaires were distributed to students and the end of the study The researcher handed out the questionnaires and clarified each items since there were some terms that students need further explanation to understand The students‘ response were quantified to find out the percentage of students who agreed, disagreed or was neutral for each statement

The teacher‘s journal was noted down during each training session The detailed descriptions included details of the improvements of the students, their difficulties they had as well as their opinions about using phonetic transcription in pronunciation learning

In this chapter, the study presented the research design including the research method as well as detailed steps to carry out the research To be more specific, the method chosen was action research including four main steps: identifying problems, planning the action, implementing the action and evaluation the result Besides, the chapter also included detail description about the subject of the study In addition, this chapter described in details the instruments to collect the data for the research including the pre-questionnaire, the post-questionnaire, the pre-test, the post-test and the teacher‘s journal during six training sessions Last but not least, the study described the process of collecting and analyzing the data in whole research

CHAPTER 4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

In this chapter, the study presents findings and results collected from the research instruments including the questionnaires, the pre-test and the post-test and the teacher‘s journal The first part presents and summarizes the mistakes and difficulties of the students in pronouncing vowel sounds, which serve for the purpose of comparing the students‘ improvement before and after being trained with the techniques The results were drawn from pre-questionnaire and pre-test The second part, also the main part, is the improvements of the students after learning with phonetic transcription The result was collected from the post-questionnaire, post-test and the teacher‘s journal Last but not least, this chapter also presents the students‘ opinion about learning with phonetic transcription

4.1 The mistakes and difficulties of students in pronouncing vowel sounds

This part provides a detail and complete picture about the mistakes and difficulties of the students in pronouncing vowel sounds as well as assumming several possible reasons for that From this result, the reseacher could draw up a useful action plan to help the students improve their pronunciaiton skills of vowel sounds by using phonetic transcription The researcher carried out the pre-test with the aim of determining the level of making mistakes that students made to vowel sounds and figures out which sounds were the most problematic The result presented in the line chart below was the average point from the two evaluators

Figure 3: The percentage of students making mistakes in each vowel sound in the

pre-test

As could be seen from the line chart, the most mispronounced sound was /ɑː/

by nearly ninety per cent of the students followed by the sound /e/ with more than eighty percent It seemed that the students failed to recognize the target sound and mistook it into another sound For example, the students mispronounced the sound

/ɑː/ (hard) as the sound /a/ in Vietnamese The sound /e/ (preference) was pronounced

as /i/ The other vowels /ɔ:/, /u:/, /ʌ/, /æ /, and /ʊ/ were mispronounced by fifty to sixty per cent of the students About third fifth students mispronounced the sound

/ʌ/ (another) as /o/ and the sound /æ/ in (anger) was turned as /a/ The sound /ɔ:/

was pronounced as its short partner /ɔ/ The sound /u:/ and /ʊ/ were both pronounced as /u/, like a sound in Vietnamese Nearly half of the students

pronounced the sound /i:/(sweep) as /e/ The sound /ə/ (support) was mispronounced

by 47,44 per cent and the most common mistake was that the students pronounced it

as /u/ About 40 per cent of the students made mistakes with the sound /ei/ (labour)

Many of them pronounced it as /a/

The two diphthongs causing most trouble for about two third of the students were /eə/ and /aʊ/ Most of the students mispronounced the sound /eə/ (fare) into /a/ and the sound /aʊ/ (allowance) into /âu/ As could be seen from the test, about

nearly thirty per cent of the students failed to produce correctly the diphthong /ɪə/ and slightly more than twenty per cent of the test takers mispronounced the sound /ʊə/ The frequently seen mistake was that the students often dropped the ending sound /ə/ About one fifth of the students mispronounced diphthongs /ɑi/ The sound

/ɔi/ (employ) was recorded to be the only sound to be correctly pronounced by all the test-takers (See Appendix 11)

From the teacher‘s journal during early sessions of pronunciation training, the teacher also noticed some common mistakes by a large number of the students Most of them had difficulty in distinguishing between the long and the short vowels When it came to minimal pairs such as "seat" and "sit", "sheep" and "ship", the teacher tried to lengthen the /i:/ sound for them to listen, so that they could pronounce the sounds individually but had difficulty in words and sentences Similar issue concerned with the sound /u:/ and /ʊ/ When they listened, many of them were able to recognize the difference between those two, but fewer of them were able to imitate successfully that distinction What‘s more, there are many

words with ‗oo' pattern that may be pronounced as either /u:/ (food, tooth, mood,

noodle) or /ʊ/ (foot, good, cooker) This can cause confusion for learners Except for

being provided with phonetic transcription, the students misrecognized the sound /u:/and /ʊ/ in many cases They also could not distinguish the vowel sound /e/ and

/æ/ in some cases such as in bed and bad The confusion between /e/ and /æ/ may be

considered as one of the most common problems that the students encountered when they learned to English vowels

From data of the pre-test, the average percentage of mistakes recorded was 48,21 per cent The most commonly seen mistakes were grouped into three types The first type of mistake was that the students often pronounced a sound basing on word‘s orthography This mistake was found in a number of sounds such as the

sound /eə/ (fare) into /a/, the sound /ʌ/ (another) into /o/ and the sound /æ/ in (anger) into /a/, the sound /i:/ (sweep) into /e/, the sound /ə/ (support) into /u/, the sound /ei/ (labour) into /a/ The second type of mistake was that the students tended

to generalize the pronunciation of same patterns For example, the sound /e/

(preference) was pronounced into /i/; the sound /aʊ/ (allowance) was pronounced

into /âu/ The third type of mistake was that the students could not distinguish clearly between close sounds in minimal pairs such as /u:/ and /ʊ/, /e/ and /æ/, /i:/ and /ɪ/, /ɔ:/ and /ɔ/

In order to investigate more into the most frequent mistakes and difficulties

of the students in pronunciation, the teacher collected date from the pre- questionnaire and the result was presented below

1 I was not able to pronounce vowel sounds

4 I often guessed how to pronounce a vowel

sound rather than knowing it for sure

5 I was confused when a vowel could be

pronounced differently in different cases

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90%100% never seldom sometimes frequently always

Figure 4: The difficulties of the students in pronouncing vowel sounds and

phonetic transcription

For item 1, more than sixty per cent of the students claimed that they always had difficulties in being able to pronounce vowel sounds in English About thirty percent frequently encountered this problem, and less than ten per cent sometimes had difficulty with it This was the most seen difficulty among the students and also the main problem that needed urgent action to deal with

For item 2, one out of ten students always had difficulty in telling how many vowel sounds there were in English The majority of the students frequently encountered this problem which meant they could tell a number of vowel sounds but could not name all of them More than ten per cent chose occasionally which

meant they were not really sure about their knowledge of vowel sounds and

sometimes still had trouble with it

For item 3, nearly one third of the students claimed that they always had difficulty in understanding phonetic transcription of the vowel sounds Half of them usually faced this problem Only twenty per cent of the respondents reported that they sometimes could not understand some phonetic symbols of vowel sounds

For item 4, nearly two third of the students frequently had to guess how to pronounce a vowel instead of knowing it for sure About a quarter of them sometimes had to guess and less than ten per cent always had to guess which meant they had no idea about how vowel sounds were pronounced and just came up with any pronouncing that they could think of

For item 5, the vast majority of the students claimed that they was frequently confused because a vowel letter could be pronounced differently in different combination in words Nearly one fifth of the students encountered this problem all the time while only slightly more than 10 per cent of the students sometimes had to face it

To sum up, the difficulties that the students encountered most was that they was not able to pronounce the vowel sounds in English and was not able to understand the phonetic transcription The majority of the students frequently faced the problems of naming the number of vowel sounds, being confused due to the variation of a vowel sounds in different cases and consequently had to guess the pronouncing of a vowel sound instead of knowing it for certain

The teacher also collected data from the questionnaire to investigate the underlying reasons why the students encountered such mistakes in pronunciation as well as the difficulties that they had in pronunciation skills The details were presented in the bar chart below

Figure 5: Reasons for the students’ difficulties in pronunciation

As could be illustrated from the bar chart, for item 1, nearly eighty per cent

of the students agreed that the lack of basic knowledge about the vowel sounds system in English was one of the main reasons for their struggling in pronunciation, especially about the vowel sounds Slightly more than twenty per cent chose neutral idea For reason 2, half of the students disagreed with the idea that ― Because I had never learned about phonetic transcription before‖ which meant they used to learn Nearly forty per cent of the students stayed neutral point for that More than ten per cent said that they had never approached this technique in pronunciation learning For reason 3, seventy percent of the students admitted that they did not pay enough attention to pronunciation in compared to other skills and components like reading, listening, grammar, vocabulary Only five percent of the students disagree with that which meant they did try to learn pronunciation in equal to other language skills

For reason 4, the result was quite similar to the reason 3 with over sixty per cent of the students thought that pronunciation skills was not taught enough at school There might be a link between two reasons It could be assumed that because pronunciation skills was not taught enough at school, consequently the

strongly agree agree

neutral disagree

strongly disagree

1 Because I did not have much knowledge

about vowel system in English

2 Because I had never learned about phonetic

transcription before

3 Because I did not pay attention to pronunciation skills in compared to other…

4 Because pronunciation skills was not paid

much attention in teaching at school

5 Because I was influenced by the way I speak

Vietnamese

6 Because the pronunciation feature in English

was different from that in Vietnamese

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90%100%