An investigation into the common errors in pronouncing word-final consonants “s”, “z”, “t” faced by six year-old students at Phu Xuyen primary school

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ***************** LÊ PHƯƠNG LAN AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE COMMON

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

*****************

LÊ PHƯƠNG LAN

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE COMMON ERRORS IN

PRONOUNCING WORD - FINAL CONSONANTS /S/, /Z/, /T/ FACED BY SIX YEAR-OLD STUDENTS AT PHU XUYEN PRIMARY SCHOOL

(Điều tra về lỗi phổ biến của học sinh lớp 1 trường tiểu học Phú Xuyên khi phát âm phụ âm cuối /s/, /z/, /t/ của từ)

M.A PROGRAMME MINOR THESIS

Field:English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111

HANOI, 2015

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

*****************

LÊ PHƯƠNG LAN

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE COMMON ERRORS IN

PRONOUNCING WORD - FINAL CONSONANTS /S/, /Z/, /T/ FACED BY SIX YEAR-OLD STUDENTS AT PHU XUYEN PRIMARY SCHOOL

(Điều tra về lỗi phổ biến của học sinh lớp 1 trường tiểu học Phú Xuyên khi phát âm phụ âm cuối /s/, /z/, /t/ của từ)

M.A PROGRAMME MINOR THESIS

Field:English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111

Supervisor: Ph.D Phạm Thị Thanh Thùy

HANOI, 2015

CANDIDATE’S STATEMENT

I hereby certify that the minor thesis entitled “An investigation into the

common errors in pronouncing word-final consonants /s/, /z/, /t/ faced by 6 year-old students at Phu Xuyen primary school” is completely my own research which carried

out at Phu Xuyen primary school during the whole school-year since 2012, and the thesis has not been submitted for any degree at any other university or institution

Hanoi, August 16th, 2015

Lê Phương Lan

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Mrs Pham Thi Thanh Thuy, Ph.D for her invaluable supervision, constructive criticism, and enthusiastic encouragement without which the writing of this thesis would not have been successfully completed

Secondly, my sincere thanks are sent to Mr Eduardo Culbeaux from the English Language Institute for his assistance in three experimental recording tasks and especially for his comments about the data collection procedure

Thirdly, I am thankful to the lecturers and staff of the Faculty of Post – Graduate Studies at the University of Languages and International Studies for their scientific knowledge, enthusiastic guidance during my course

My high appreciation and gratitude also extend to all the 6-year-old students at Phu Xuyen primary school for their contribution to the reliability of this study

Last but not least, I owe my deep thanks to my family, my friends who keep encouraging me to complete this work

Being a teacher, an observer and researcher of Grade 1 classes at Phu Xuyen primary school for the whole school-year since 2012, seeing a lot of mispronunciation errors happened, the researcher must conduct this case study research as a matter of urgency to help students to overcome these errors from the early school

Two classes with 35 students naturally participated in the study through three experimental recording tasks and the basic questionnaire in Vietnamese The quantitative data gathered will provide readers with many reliable results relating to most problematic ending consonant sounds, the common errors in pronouncing these sounds, the causes as well the possible solutions to deal with such errors

The results reveal the following concerning information Firstly, most of the subjects of the study struggle many difficulties in pronouncing the ending sound consonants /s/, /z/, /t/ Secondly, the most common errors were sound omitted, sound confusion and sound redundancy The causes leading to such errors were mainly the direct imitation of the teacher or friends‟ sounds, the lack of detailed instruction on the pronunciation of isolated consonant sounds and the students‟ laziness To help students pronounce more correctly, some strategies are being applied effectively such as the media/ software with the standard pronunciation of the native for students to listen and read aloud, encouraging students to ask for help from others and requiring students to practice as much as possible With limitations of the minor thesis, it is hoped that the study will be useful for other teachers or researchers with the passion for improving students‟ pronunciation, especially pronunciation with the word-final consonant sounds

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CANDIDATE’S STATEMENT……… i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……… ii

ABSTRACT……… iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS……… iv

LISTS OF TABLES……… vii

LISTS OF FIGURES……… viii

PART A – INTRODUCTION ……… 1

1 Statement of the problem and rationale of the study ……… 1

2 Aims of the study ……… 2

3 Research questions ……… 3

4 Scope of the research ……… 3

5 Significance of the study ……… 3

6 Organization of the study ……… 4

PART B – DEVELOPMENT ……… 5

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW ……… 5

1.1 English consonants in general……… 5

1.1.1 Phonological characteristics and articulation of the sound /t/……… 6

1.1.2 Phonological characteristics and articulation of the sound /s/……… 7

1.1.3 Phonological characteristics and articulation of the sound /z/……… 7

1.2 Word-final consonants……… 8

1.2.1 English word-final consonants……… 8

1.2.2 Vietnamese word-final consonants……… 8

1.2.3 Comparison between Vietnamese and English word-final consonants……… 10

1.3 Pronunciation errors……… 11

1.3.1 Errors and Mistakes……… 11

1.3.2 Pronunciation errors……… 12

1.3.3 Description of errors……… 12

1.3.4 Explanation of errors……… 13

1.4 Previous works……… 13

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY……… 18

2.1 Research design……… 18

2.2 Participants of the study……… 18

2.3 Data collection procedure……… 19

2.4 Data analysis procedure……… 21

CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS ……… 23

3.1 Common errors in pronunciation……… 23

3.1.1 Errors with ending sound /z/……… 24

3.1.2 Errors with ending sound /s/……… 24

3.1.3 Errors with ending sound /t/……… 26

3.2 Sources of error reasons in 3 ending consonants……… 27

3.2.1 Internal reasons……… 27

3.2.1.1 Origin……… 27

3.2.1.2 Hobbies……… 28

3.2.2 External reasons……… 30

3.2.2.1 Reasons from teachers……… 30

3.2.2.2 Reasons from textbook……… 30

3.3 Suggestions to remove problems……… 31

3.3.1 Phonics with consonants emphasis and practice……… 31

3.3.2 Phonics with self-correction program ……….……… 32

PART C – CONCLUSION ……… 35

1 Summary of findings……… 35

2 Concluding marks……… 35

3 Teaching recommendations……… 37

4 Limitations and suggestions for further research……… 38

REFERENCES……… 40 APPENDIX 1……… I APPENDIX 2……… III APPENDIX 3……… XIV APPENDIX 4……… XV APPENDIX 5……… XVIII APPENDIX 6……… XXI

LISTS OF TABLES

Table 1 : English consonants

Table 2 : Vietnamese initial consonants

Table 3 : Vietnamese final consonants

Table 4 : Common errors found in the data

Table 5 : More problematic consonants

Table 6 : Number of subjects with errors in pronouncing the ending sound /z/

and types of errors in isolated words Table 7 : Number of subjects with errors in pronouncing the ending sound /s/

and types of errors in isolated words Table 8 : Number of subjects with errors in pronouncing the ending sound /t/

and types of errors in isolated words Table 9 : Students‟ opinion about the causes of errors

Table 10 : Students' reflection on their teacher‟s strategies to help them to

overcome the errors Table 11 : Students‟ self-strategies to correct the errors

LISTS OF FIGURES

Figure 1 : Articulation of the sound /t/

Figure 2 : Articulation of the sound /s/

Figure 3 : Articulation of the sound /z/

Figure 4 : Students' perceptions of the difficulty of pronouncing the word-final

consonants Figure 5 : Percentage of students‟ opinion about the causes of errors

Figure 6 : Percentage of Students' reflection on their teacher‟s strategies Figure 7 : Percentage of students‟ frequencies of applying these self-strategies

PART A – INTRODUCTION

1 Statement of the problem and rationale of the study

English language has become an international language that is widely used by a large number of people from many countries for the purposes of communication, further studying career or seeking better jobs in foreign companies (Crystal, 2003) Towards the importance of this language, the Decision No 1400/QĐ – TTg on September 30th

2008 by the Prime Minister Government emphasized that foreign language should be taught in the national education system at all levels includes training levels To meet the demand, the principal of Phu Xuyen primary school has decided to choose one of the English programs that are allowed by Ministry of Education to implement The Phonics Learning Box United Kingdom program has been applied in this school since

2010 with the aim of providing students a chance to access an international language from the first grade of a primary school

It is said that the target of learning any foreign language is through the success of communication in the detailed daily-life contexts However, very few people can reach this ideal target since learners have many serious common errors in pronunciation, which causes the breakdown of communication The reason here is “a learner who consistently mispronounces a range of phonemes can be extremely difficult for a speaker from another language community to understand” (Kelly, 2000:11) According

to Celce – Murcia (1985), mastering grammar rules and having a rich vocabulary are important for learners but these important things would become useless if learners could not pronounce exactly structures or words Sharing the view, Hinofitis and Baily (1980, as cited in Ha, 2005) reported that up to a certain proficiency standard, the fault that most severely impaired the communication process in English foreign learners was pronunciation, rather than vocabulary or grammar To deal with these problems, there are 70 learning periods for 2 semesters during the school year in the Phonics program

With this syllabus, students will have 2 periods per week to develop comprehensively 4 English skills, reading – writing – listening – speaking In addition, these students have

a chance to learn English pronunciation quite frequently Specifically, every period, two Vietnamese teachers are required to help students to practice pronouncing English sounds, words and short sentences The other compulsory is that teachers have to design the supplementary activities and check students‟ pronunciation errors, especially the errors with word ending sounds When being implemented, this English program is hoped to help students with bettering speaking and communication skills

In fact, since the facts of observing many first - grade classes of Phu Xuyen primary school, a number of mispronunciation errors produced by many 6-year-old students Among the pronunciation errors that students are likely to make (i.e intonation, word and sentence stress, linking sounds, ending sounds, etc.), errors with word-final consonants can be seen as the most serious According to the result of earlier research

by the Australian Government publication Asian Language Motes (1978, as cited in Pham, 2009), Vietnamese students face many difficulties in pronouncing final clusters instead of initial clusters Also based on the research on common problems of Vietnamese learners, “English consonant clusters give Vietnamese learners problems not only because they do not have these combinations in theirs own language, but also because they produce a variety of syllable types‟ (as cited in Nguyen, 2011) The finding from Nguyen (2004, as cited in Pham, 2009) showed that 100% participants have problems with ending sounds Due to the importance of pronunciation in communication, this study is expected to examine the facts of common errors of 6-year-old students at Phu Xuyen primary school when dealing with many word-final consonants /s/, /z/, /t/

2 Aims of the study

The purpose of this study is investigating the common errors made by 6 year-old students at Phu Xuyen primary school to:

- Identify the situation of errors made when pronouncing word-final consonants: /s/, /z/ and /t/ faced by those learners;

- Find out the causes of the errors;

- Provide some suggestions assisted by Phonics Program for both teachers and students to overcome the errors

It is hoped that the study will be considered as a useful document for both teachers and students to better their teaching and learning pronunciation

3 Research questions

The study is expected to find answers to the following questions:

1) What is the situation of errors made when pronouncing word-final consonants: /s/, /z/ and /t/?

2) Why do 6 year-old students make those errors?

3) What are some possible solutions assisted by Phonics Program in helping teachers and students to correct those errors?

4 Scope of the research

English sounds consist of 44 sounds with 20 vowels sounds and 24 consonants In fact, Vietnamese students do not have errors with all the English vowels and consonants Also, due to the limited time and the scale of the minor thesis, the researcher only focuses on 3 word-final consonants /s/, /z/ and /t/ made by 6 year-old students at Phu Xuyen primary school where the researcher has visited many times to observe the learning process of these participants during the whole school-year

5 Significance of the study

Even though there have been numerous studies on word-final consonant errors, few investigations into errors in the production of such consonants as /s/, /z/ and /t/ The participants for those early studies focus on students at high school or at the university and research on young learners in English has not received much attention The process

of data collection is stressful for participants, especially, participants with lower

English proficiency Specifically, researchers test each student in a separate room and student was required to finish the given tasks Then, to remove this problem, this study

is intended to collect data in the most natural possible way to get the most effective result through games and activities Another problem in previous studies was about the ones with analyzing the data There was no standard software or native speakers‟ participation; thus, this study will fix this problem by engaging the native speaker to evaluate students‟ errors through the recordings with clear criteria These improvements above are hoping to provide an insight into the common errors in pronouncing word-final consonants /s/, /z/, /t/ of 6-year-old students at Phu Xuyen primary school

6 Organization of the study

The study consists of three main parts as follow

The first part concluding “Introduction” deals with statement of the problem, rationale,

aims, research questions, scope, significance, methodology with briefly introducing design, participants, data gathering instruments and data analysis procedure

Part B is the development with three chapters Chapter 1 “Literature review” is devoted to the theoretical background and a critical analysis of some related studies Chapter 2 “Methodology” describes the research methodology with the description of the participants, a plan to collect adequate and reliable data for analysis including the research gathering instruments and procedures of data collection as well as procedures

of data analysis The next chapter “Findings and Discussions” mainly deals with the findings from collecting and analyzing the research data

Part C, the Conclusion concerns concluding marks, implications with some recommendations for correcting word-final consonant errors of 6-year-old students Besides, the study provides some suggestions for further research on this topic

PART B – DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW

In this chapter, the researcher provides readers with the relevant literature of the study

by introducing some key concepts for understanding the research, as well as the review

of previous studies related to the topic Some crucial concepts need to be clarified in this part are consonants in general, word-final consonants particularly in English and in Vietnamese To understand many difficulties of Vietnamese learners when dealing with word-final consonants, the comparison between English and Vietnamese final consonants is illustrated Then, the theoretical background in pronunciation error will

be critically presented to better the knowledge base of the study

1.1 English consonants in general

According to Peter Roach (2000), consonants are sounds that are “difficult or impossible for the air to pass through the mouth” The author emphasized that these sounds do not really obstruct the flow of air Jones (1972) stated all sounds which are voiced, in the production of which the air has an impeded passage through the mouth (/b/, rolled /r/), in the production of which the air does not pass through the mouth (/g/, /m/), in which there is an audible friction (/f/, /v/, /s/, /z/, /b/), are called consonants There are 24 consonants in the English consonant system (Table 1) Then, the criteria

to categorize each consonant are the place of articulator, the manner of articulation and voicing According to Kelly (2000) and Peter Roach (2000), 24 consonants are divided into 6 groups:

Table 1: English consonants (Duong, 2009)

1.1.1 Phonological characteristics and articulation of the sound /t/

/t/ is alveolar stop and to make this sound, “the tongue blade is pressed against the alveolar ridge (Figure 1) Normally the tongue does not touch the front teeth as it does

in the dental plosives found in many languages” (Roach, 2000)

Figure 1: (As retrieved from

http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/

In comparison with the sound /d/, the

strong stop /t/ is aspirated For example, to pronounce the word “too”, /thu:/, we have to put the tongue tip on the very centre of the alveolar ridge and only the very point of the

tongue is in contact, not the blade; then allow the air to burst out with a voiceless vowel /u:/

1.1.2 Phonological characteristics and articulation of the sound /s/

According to Peter Roach (2000), /s/

is alveolar fricative with the same

articulation as /t/, the air escapes

through a narrow passage along the

centre of the tongue, and the sound

produced is comparatively intense

(Figure 2)

Figure 2: (As retrieved from http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/englis

O‟Connor (1975) suggested that to feel the strong friction /s/, we make small changes

in the position of the tip and blade if the tongue until the cold air is hitting the tongue at the very centre if the alveolar ridge, not further forward and not further back

1.1.3 Phonological characteristics and articulation of the sound /z/

/s/ and /z/ are alveolar fricative with the

nearly same articulation but /z/ is quite

weak, short and may be voiced

(O‟Connor, 1975) The articulation of the

sound is shown in figure 3

Figure 3:(As retrieved from http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/en

1.2 Word-final consonants

1.2.1 English word - final consonants

The English language has 24 consonants and most of them can occur in word-initial position, word-medial position and word-final position except for some sounds /h/, /ʒ/ About the position of final consonants, Yule (2006) showed the basic structure of a syllable found in English

Syllable

According to Rachael (2003), there can be up to 4 consonants in a coda:

 If there are no consonants at the end of the word, it has zero coda e.g go /ɡoʊ/

 A single consonant is called the final consonant Any consonant except for /h/, /r/,

/w/, /j/ may be a final coda e.g cat /kᴂt/, price / praɪs/

When there are two or more consonants standing at the end of the word, the term

“pre-final” and “post-final” are used

 Two consonant clusters e.g help /help/, bank /bæŋk/

 Three consonant clusters e.g next /nekst/

 Four consonant clusters e.g prompts /prɒmpts/

1.2.2 Vietnamese word-final consonants

Vietnamese is a tone, monosyllabic language, and its consonants are classified into 22 initial consonants and 6 final consonants (Seen in Table 2 and Table 3)

Table 2: Vietnamese initial consonants (Duong, 2009)

Place of articulation/ Manner

of articulation

Place of articulation

ɲ Fricative

i /m/ in words like em [ɛɯ] (I, younger sister/brother), lượm [lɯɪɤ:m] (pick up), nghiêm [ŋiem] (strict)

ii /n/ in word like ăn [an] (eat), làm [la:m] (do), phiên [fien]

iii /ŋ/: there are three allophones of this phoneme:

[ŋm]: bilabialized, produced by rounded vowels /u, o, ɔ/ - xong [soŋm], súng [ʃuŋm] không [xoŋm]

[ŋ]: corresponding to letters „nh‟, proceded by front vowels /i, e, ɛ/ - bệnh [beŋ], tình [tiŋ], nhanh [ŋaŋ]

[ŋ]: elsewhere - tặng [taŋ], thiêng [thieŋ], chuộng [cuoŋ]

iv /p/: with no air released after pronunciation, in words like úp [up], Pháp [fap], tiếp [tiep]

v /t/: in English , [t] ending is pronounced both as [t] and [ʔ], but in Vietnam it is always pronounced shortly and sharply without aspiration such as ớt [ɤ:t], giết [ziet], ghét [gɛt]

vi /k/: this sound is produced where the letter “c”, “ch” is shown at the final position of a syllable and it is agreed by many linguistics that this phoneme has 3 allophones which appear in a complementary distribution

[kp]: this ending sound is bilabialized if the consonant is preceded by round vowels /u,

ɒ, ɔ] - ngọc [ŋɔkp], cốc [kp], nhục [kp]

[c]: preceded by front vowels /i, e, ɛ/, performed by letters “ch” - nghịch [ŋic], lệch [lec], sách [sa:c]

[k]: elsewhere - nhác [ŋa:k], bực [bɯk], luộc [luok]

vii /w/: this final semi-vowel only appears in forms of letters “u” or “o” which follow

vowels to make dipthongs or triphthongs, for example, đau [da:w], vào [va:w], đều [dew]

viii /j/: appears in forms of “i” or “y” and is preceded by vowels to make diphthongs and

triphthongs - tay [ta:j], dài [da:j]

1.2.3 Comparison between Vietnamese and English word-final consonants

Above the structure of any syllable in English and Vietnamese, basically, there must be

a consonant, a vowel and a coda Nevertheless, the major difference between these languages is a coda in each language Vietnamese sounds accept either a vowel or a consonant to be a coda On the contrary, only consonant is considered as a coda in English syllable For example, the final sound in the word “đau” is a semi-vowel /ṷ/ In English, if the final sound is vowel like in the word go /ɡəʊ/, it is a zero coda with no consonant in the final position

From all the examples above, it is obvious that most of the English consonants can stand at flexible positions, either in word-initial or in word-medial or in word-final one However, almost all of the Vietnamese consonants occur in word-initial position Besides, the English final consonants may consist of single or consonant clusters that are made from more than two final consonants that follow each other These consonant clusters cannot be found in the Vietnamese consonantal system

In this study, three final consonant sounds /s/, /z/, /t/ are investigated between two languages However, only the sound /t/ can be found at the final position in two languages The sounds /s/, /z/ do not stand at the final position of the English words (as can be seen in Table 1 and Table 3)

For these above differences between the two languages, it is reasonable that Vietnamese learners seem to have obstacles when pronouncing the English word-final consonants Honestly, students also tend to forget to pronounce and release the English consonants in word-final position or even if they can be aware of the English final consonant sounds, they still make serious errors

1.3 Pronunciation errors

1.3.1 Errors and Mistakes

Errors and mistakes are very common in learning any new foreign language Lennon, (1991, cited in Ellis, 2008) described error as, “a linguistic form or combination of forms which, in the same context and under similar conditions of production, would, in all likelihood, not be produced by the speaker‟s native speaker counterparts.” Sharing the idea with Lennon, Burt and Krashen (1982) found that errors are “flawed side of learner speech or writing” From these definitions, error can be seen as the different forms a speaker produces by speaking or writing in comparison with the native‟s form Many researchers are trying to make a distinction between errors and mistakes According to Brown (2007), Ellis (1997), Corder (1981), a mistake refers to a performance error that is either a random guess or a “slip”, in that it is a failure to utilize a known system correctly while an error, a noticeable deviation from the adult grammar of a native speaker, reflects the competence of the learner Towards a “slip”

of performance errors, learners make mistakes in the case of carelessness, inattention while they definitely know the system However, when learners face up with errors which are the result of the systematic competent This is something new that they cannot work out for themselves (Adrian, 1994)

1.3.2 Pronunciation errors

It is believed that learners are likely to make many errors naturally during the process

of learning any foreign languag According to Ha (2005), “learning a language means learning a new way of using speech organs, new ways of controlling the speech organs

in order to produce sound peculiar to the new language” As a result, errors in pronunciation can occur naturally at any time of any conversation in communication contexts Jenkins (2006) defined pronunciation errors as “variants of pronunciation which prevent one communication from understanding the propositional content of the other‟s utterances)

of an item that must appear in a well-formed utterance”, addition is “the presence of an item that must not appear in well-formed utterances”, misinformations are “the use of the wrong form of the morpheme or structure" and misorderings are “the incorrect placement of a morpheme or group of morphemes in an utterance”

However, these descriptions seem to be suitable for learners whose English competency is from intermediate level up to higher levels Similarly, an investigation into 6-year old students with very basic knowledge of English, the description of Ha (2005) was much more suitable with 3 types of errors, sound omitted, sound confusion, sound redundancy In this study, the researcher intends to follow the error types from

Ha (2005) to clarify the most common errors in pronouncing word-final consonants, examine the reasons and suggest some possible solutions

1.3.4 Explanation of errors

There are a number of different terms and categorizations that can be used for explaining an error Stating the reasons for pronunciation errors by Vietnamese learners, lack of knowledge of the manner and the place of articulation, the negative interference of the mother tongue, lack of consciousness of being standard or insufficient drills and practice are the main reasons (Duong, 2009, p.48)

The reasons for making errors above sound suitable for the case of many Vietnamese learners Mastering a foreign language both in speaking and in writing are not easy and takes time The first reason comes from the difference in the structure of speech manner and articulation Moreover, lack of English proficiency is the biggest obstacle for learners as well Another reason is the use of the terms „transfer errors,‟ meaning errors made because of interference from another language and „intralingual errors,‟ (Ellis, 2008, as cited in Taylorson, 2011)

The results of these two studies above are quite reasonable; however, they would be more convincible if the participants of each study were described in more detail In the article on Vietnam National University Journal of Science, Duong (2009) only introduced “Vietnamese learners” without description of participants‟ proficiency, ages, learning experiments, etc Taylorson (2011) conducted a research on the word final consonant errors of one L1 Mandarin speaking Master student studying at a UK university She also lacks the detailed introduction about the participants‟ information Frankly, each learner will have different problems with final consonants As a result, seeing the weak points of the above studies, the researcher will investigate carefully each 6 year-old student‟s ability in pronouncing each word-final sound to see his/her errors in detail

1.4 Previous works

It is said that common errors in pronunciation draw a great deal of attention from many researchers There have been a numerous studies carried out with the aim of finding the

common errors, causes of making errors and some given solutions for learners to overcome these challenges

Nguyen (2011) studied on 30 English-majored second-year students at Phuong Dong University to find out the errors when students pronounce English final consonant clusters She used two instruments to collect data, recording and observation In phase

1, the author recorded all the sounds from the students through the mid-term oral test and “all the errors made by students were counted in terms of types” However, the researcher is confused about the criteria to help the author to classify the types of errors Phase 2 required students to read the words individually Getting students to read aloud in front of the other students is likely to make students feel stressed or shy, which may affect the correctness and the general result of the whole study Another problem in this study was about the relevance between the topic and the research question Although the topic focused on “strategies”, there is no question about the cause of these errors Thus, the researcher is wondering how the author can generalize strategies without mentioning the causes

“A study on common mistakes makes by Vietnamese beginners of English in pronouncing ɵ δ ʃ ʒ ʤ ʧ and possible solution” which is carried out by Le (2011) has certain gap that needs fixing In the techniques employed in the thesis, the author mentioned a series of gathering instruments They were tape-recording, questionnaire and interviews She reviewed the theoretical background carefully; but, there was little application for her thesis In the procedure, the author recorded the students‟ pronunciation when reading aloud some English sounds, words and a short passage without mentioning the detailed way to gather data Each student would read aloud the language items or the whole class together read Then, the quality of the room where the author carried out the thesis was not mentioned After recording, she piloted the data two times and conducts the other method, the questionnaire In fact, the survey

questionnaire was designed carefully to find out the answers for 3 reasonable research questions:

1) What common mistakes do Vietnamese learners have in pronouncing the

2) What are the causes of those mistakes?

3) What are possible solutions to those mistakes?

Dao (2012) studied on “some common mistakes made by Vietnamese learners of English when pronouncing English final consonants” and her thesis provides readers with useful information to develop on further studies One hundred and fifty informants were senior English non-major students at Thai Nguyen University of Economics and Business Administration These informants were experienced through two stages In phase 1, 30 informants had to complete 4 reading tasks: “reading aloud isolated words, reading aloud sentences/ utterances, reading aloud a conversation, and reading aloud a text and a story This experiment helped students to get familiar with the tasks in increasing levels The questionnaire was given to 150 informants after gathering the data from recording part with the aim of seeking the causes and solutions for the problems The only thing the researcher wonders is about the inconsistent number of informants between two stages All the informants of the thesis gave their answers for the questionnaire but only 30 informants did recording The selection of informants should be explained to help reader deeply understand the intention of the author

Most of the researchers of the above studies shared firmly the view on the causes of making such pronunciation errors as:

- Lack of knowledge of the manner and the place of articulation of the English sounds

- The negative interference of the mother tongue, i.e the English sounds are pronounced

in the Vietnamese way

- Lack of consciousness of being standard: learners are taught about how these sounds are produced They only pronounce them correctly in their pronunciation lessons in the classroom and in examinations, but not in real communication

- Insufficient drill and practice: Despite having some knowledge about pronunciation of these sounds, many Vietnamese learners do not have enough opportunity to use them

in communication For them, their only language environment is the classroom, and they speak Vietnamese outside the classroom

- Making mistakes is, therefore, unavoidable for Vietnamese learners who are learning English as foreign language in difficult environment where Vietnamese is used as the official language

(Duong, 2009, p.48) The researchers of the studies above showed the same opinion about the position of the English consonants, which was difficult for Vietnamese learners to pronounce Specifically, the information from the finding of Ha (2005) indicated the fact:

Table 4: Common errors found in the data (Ha, 2005)

Types of errors No of subjects with errors

Taking time deeply review on many previous works, the researcher has a chance to get many strong points of view for each word as well as learn how to eliminate some weak

points The data needs to be changed to make the data collection more consistent, correct Besides, gathering data in the most natural way should be prepared carefully The studies above mainly apply the method of recording, questionnaire or interview However, the quality of recorder or the room used to record is not paid attention much Many reading tasks in recording can affect not only students‟ psychology but also the correctness of the data collection The way to conduct a recording part, therefore, needs

to change a little to make students reduce their stress and foster their reaction skills in the most natural way

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY

This chapter begins with the facts of teaching and learning the word-final consonants at Phu Xuyen primary school, a description of participants and the research design Additionally, it is of great importance to have an insight into the process of collecting and analyzing data, which helps readers to understand the whole process of finding the results for this study

2.1 Research design

Becker (1970) stated that a case study refers to a detailed analysis of an individual case supposing that “one can properly acquire knowledge of the phenomenon from intensive exploration of a single case” Case study aims at generating findings of relevance beyond the individual cases (as cited in Fidel, 1984) The author Nunan (1992) shared the view on the description of a case study as an “instance in action” where the researcher usually observes particular characteristics of an individual unit in the context in which it occurs In the same vein, the researcher intends to take an investigation of making word-final consonants errors of 6-year-old students in the detailed context of Phu Xuyen primary school

2.2 Participants of the study

The sample of the study is 35 students of two grade-1 classes that started to learn English from the beginning of the school year 2013 and 2 Vietnamese teachers who taught English in these classes Before this year, students did not attend any English course at kindergarten level The age of these participants is 6 years-old and both female and male students joined this study naturally The nature of carrying out the study receives much attention since teaching English for 6 year-old students is shaping the early correctness of pronouncing English sounds, words and sentences Additionally, helping students build the love, passion for learning English is very important from the brand-new step accessing a new foreign language

2.3 Data collection procedure

To carry out an error analysis, Richards (1980) stated, elicitation techniques include translation, free composition, elicited imitation, picture description, sentence completion tasks, structured interviews, and story-telling The aim of using these techniques is to gather “experimental data”, where the researcher uses a specific tool in order to elicit the particular language he wants to look into and helping learners produce data of any sort (Coder, cited in Taylorson, 2011) Due to the effectiveness of the experimental data, in this study, the researcher intends to use two experiments to gather this kind of data and the questionnaires will be given for both teachers and students to further research on the causes of making errors and elicit some possible techniques for improvements

To be more specific, the data gathering procedure of the study is divided into 3 phases

as follows

Phase 1: Observation

In this phase, the observation paper is used at the aim of indicating the facts of teaching and learning the ending sounds /s/, /z/, /t/ of 6-year-old students at Phu Xuyen primary school There are 7 facts given with 5 ranks for each - never, seldom, sometimes, often, always - are investigated in every English period during the whole school year Thereby, the data collected will be more reliable and natural

Fact 1shows the information gained from the teaching such ending consonant sounds /s/, /z/, and /t/

Fact 2 indicates the status of making errors in pronouncing the ending sounds /s/, /z/, /t/ faced by the students

Facts 3 - 4 find out the causes of the students‟ making such errors

Facts 5 - 7 examine the strategies applied by the teachers at this primary school to help the students to remove the errors

Phase 2: Recording

In the recording part, the 6 year-old students of each class will experience two reading aloud tasks in separate days since the recording time for each class is depended on the English schedule given by the principal of the school Besides, 6-year-old students are not able to sit straightly too long and their concentrated ability is not good enough to record all the tasks in the same period

To deal with the recording phase, at first, the layout of the classroom is very important for the feasibility of the study Students have to make a round while the researcher sits

at the central position with the aid of an mp3 recorder; thus, the sounds from every participant will be recorded with the best quality Secondly, the participants of the study will experience the pleasant atmosphere in each recording part through the funny activities designed by the researcher Additionally, to avoid some problems derived from the limitation of the non-native speaker, one native speaker will check the recordings and analyze the correctness of the students‟ sounds to make the result more reliable There are 2 task in the recording phase

Task 1 with the least challenging asks participants to read aloud the content of each picture card with the picture describing the word and its spelling

Task 2 is more difficult task for 6-year-old students when they have to read aloud the whole sentences that are prepared carefully

Phase 3: Questionnaire

The questionnaire aims at finding out the causes of making errors and investigating some effective solutions There are two different survey questionnaires, which are carried out in this study The first questionnaire is written in Vietnamese for 6 year-old students fully understand the questions and give the answers appropriately When delivering the questionnaire for students, each question will be explained carefully so that students can fulfill the task without any difficulty

There are 8 questions in this questionnaire Questions 1 - 4 show readers an overview

of learning English word-final /s/, /z/, /t/ of 6-year-old students at Phu Xuyen primary school

Question 5 aims at seeking the causes of making the errors

Questions 6 - 7 investigate whether students have tried any strategies to improve their pronunciation

Then, some exact strategies carried out by teachers at Phu Xuyen primary school are investigated in question 8

In the survey questionnaire for teachers, the English version aims at investigating the teachers‟ awareness of teaching the ending consonant sounds for Grade-1 students at Phu Xuyen primary school This questionnaire consists of 6 questions Question 1 examines the total teaching period for each class per week

Question 2 shows teachers‟ opinion about the importance of teaching pronunciation Questions 3 - 6 aim at finding an overview of teaching the ending consonant sounds for Grade 1 students

2.4 Data analysis procedure

To justify the common errors in pronouncing the word-final consonants /s/, /z/, /t/ of year-old students at Phu Xuyen primary school, firstly, the data gathered from the observation paper present the facts of teaching and learning the word-final consonants

6-in many English periods The researcher with the role of an observer prepares the observation papers and analyzes these facts

The data from 2 reading aloud tasks in the recording part are analyzed Task 1 requires students to read aloud 21 English final consonants There are 24 consonants in English, however, according to O‟Cornor (1975), the consonant sounds /w/, /j/, /h/ never stand

at the end of the word; thus, only 21 consonant sounds are examined The total words are 21 words, each word-final consonant sound repeats 1 time After the recording time, the number and percentage of errors made with each end consonants are counted

to find out that the particular end consonant sounds are more problematic for learners than others Besides, the recording of task 1 aims at helping the researcher to classify the types of errors, number of each type of error as well as its percentage In this task, after finding out the most problematic ending consonants, the participants have to read aloud 3 words with the final consonant sounds /s/, /z/, /t/ only The classification of Ha (2005) about these kinds of errors is used in terms of sound omission, sound confusion, sound redundancy In task 2, participants have to read aloud the 3 whole sentences with

a lot of final consonants /s/, /z/, /t/ The words in these 3 short sentences are chosen from the previous task; thus, students will finish the task much easier The sentences recorded are transcribed with the basic phonemic scripts The activities in phase 2 ordered from the least challenging to more challenging will support the learners and eliminate any students‟ nervousness so that learners can perform at their best

There are two kinds of the survey questionnaire, one for students and the other for teachers The students‟ questionnaire is given to 35 participants after all 2 reading aloud tasks to show the students‟ opinions about the causes of making such above errors and the solutions for learners to correct their errors with ending consonant sounds /s/, /z/, /t/ Prior to each phase, the participants in the recording parts and the respondents for the questionnaire are asked to sign an informed consent for ethical issues The teachers‟ questionnaire is expected to investigate the teachers‟ awareness of teaching and correcting the students‟ errors in pronouncing the ending sounds /s/, /z/, /t/

CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS

This chapter mainly presents the findings from three sources, the observation, the recording parts and the questionnaires Basing on these findings, the common errors in pronouncing the word-final consonants /s/, /z/, /t/ faced by 6-year-old students at Phu Xuyen primary school will be discussed in detail

3.1 Common errors in pronunciation

The findings through observation and recording phase presented clearly the students‟ errors in pronouncing ending sounds /z/, /z/, /t/ The facts in the observation papers indicated that teachers did not teach how to pronounce these sounds in detail in many teaching periods, which made students mispronounce the sounds often From the data

in Appendix 1, the researcher draws a summary of the number and percentage of errors made by students so that the more problematic word-final consonants will be discussed

in Table 5 below

Table 5: More problematic consonants

Word-final consonant sound Number of subjects with errors Percentage of errors (%)

3.1.1 Errors with ending sound /z/

As can be seen from Table 5, among 21 various different consonant sounds, the most problematic ending consonant is the sound /z/ 82.86 % of the 6-year-old students at Phu Xuyen primary school made errors with the sound /z/ Specifically, Table 6 emphasized that the most common type of errors is the sound omitted In task 1, 68.97

% of students forgot the sound /z/ and this percentage kept increasing in task 2 (sentences) with the percentage of 76.67 The second serious common error was the sound confusion It can be seen that reading the whole sentences caused students more errors with the sound confusion For example, 24 % of the subject in task 1 and 26.67

% of them in task 2 deviated the ending sound /z/ to /ʧ/ The sound /z/ sometimes was pronounced into /ʤ/ and no one added extra sound for this ending sound

From the survey research designed for the English teachers at Phu Xuyen primary school, 100 % of them admitted that they often paid attention to the students‟ pronunciation, especially students‟ ending sounds Then, 100 % of them did use some certain methods to help their students to correct the students‟ mispronunciation For example, they asked the students to listen, imitate the Phonics‟ standard software, and the whole class had to read aloud the sounds, words, or sentences However, in the

questions 4 “Towards the students’ mispronunciation the ending sounds, do you

perceive as a mistake?”, 50 % of the teachers said they perceived these errors as

mistakes Honestly, the teachers themselves cannot recognize the differences between a mistake and an error Besides, as mentioned in the previous chapter, in Vietnamese consonant system, there is no ending sound /z/ at the final position of the words; thus, this unfamiliar sound seems more difficult for Vietnamese students to pronounce.

Table 6: Number of subjects with errors in pronouncing the ending sound /z/ and types

of errors in isolated words

Types of

errors Task

Word-final consonant sound

Number of subjects with errors

Percentage of errors (%) Sound

3.1.2 Errors with ending sound /s/

Thirty-five students joined the recording experiments and 57.14 % of them faced with the ending sound /s/ As can be extracted from Table 7, more than 80 % of the students forgot to pronounce the ending sound /s/, 15 % of them had some confusion between the sound /s/ and /ʃ/ while the rest pronounced the final sound into /ʒ/ instead of the correct /s/ as usual The other noticeable thing was about the difficulty level in each task, which led to the increasing numbers of errors appeared in the process of reading aloud From the data gathered in the teachers‟ survey questionnaire, 50 % of the teachers sometimes did introduce the students with the place and the manner of articulation of each sound in detail The teachers also admitted to do some methods to help the students to be familiar with the ending sound /s/ that does not exit at the final

position of any Vietnamese words As a result, the number of the students with errors

in ending sound /s/ increased

Table 7: Number of subjects with errors in pronouncing the ending sound /s/ and types

of errors in isolated words

Types of

errors Task

Word-final consonant sound

Number of subjects with errors

Percentage of errors (%) Sound

3.1.3 Errors with ending sound /t/

In the process of observation and analyzing the data through recording parts, the researcher with one native speaker realized that 60 % of the subjects pronounced the ending sound /t/ incorrectly The most common error presented in Table 8 was the same as the findings in the previous ending sounds /s/, /z/ 66.67 % of them did not pronounce the ending sound /t/ The percentage increased in Task 2, more than 70 % of the students omitted the ending sound /t/ when they read the sentences 19.05 % of them in task 1 were aware of pronouncing this sound; however, the ending sound /t/ was replaced with /tr/ because of Vietnamese‟ “misperception of the aspiration of this sound” (Ha, 2005) In task 2, the percentage of the sound confusion between /t/ and /tr/ tended to decrease (08.33 %) The other problem with the ending /t/ was the addition of the sound /s/ 14.29 % of them tended to add the sound /s/ to the sound /t/ at the final position and task 2 saw the increasing percentage of this kind of error with the percentage of 20.83