LUẬN VĂN NGÔN NGỮ ANH

As far as the aspect of connected speech is concerned, it is not easy for Vietnamese learners to perform English sounds, especially English stops as well as to perceive and to comprehend

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 RATIONALE

Every language learner has a wish of achieving the most efficiency in communication To do that, learners have to pay much attention to using the language as well as pronouncing them correctly As far as the aspect of connected speech is concerned, it is not easy for Vietnamese learners to perform English sounds, especially English stops as well as to perceive and to comprehend them in conversations They meet so many difficulties in pronunciation One of those is caused by the influence of their mother tongue

on their language learning because each language has its own rules and phonetic system which may cause a lot of obstacles to learners in practicing and performing them correctly More importantly, most of the learners do not pay attention to how to pronounce English stops in the initial, middle or final positions, i.e devoicing them in the initial position, releasing them in final position, connecting them, lengthening or shortening the vowels followed by

an English stop, etc Accordingly, they may get trouble with speaking and listening to native speakers

Besides, the learners and teachers’ method as well as attitude towards pronunciation teaching and learning are not good enough From my own experience and observation in classrooms of English in Tuy Hoa Industrial College, the students are found to have few opportunities of practicing to improve their pronunciation skill because the teachers tend to equip them with knowledge of grammar and vocabulary without paying much attention to practicing pronunciation They tend to de-emphasize pronunciation in language courses Furthermore, their tests and examinations focus mainly on

writing and reading skills As a result, the students do not concentrate their time and energies on practicing pronunciation

As a teacher of English, I would like to conduct this research to identify the factors that cause problems which Vietnamese learners encounter when producing English stops to give awareness not only to Vietnamese learners of English, but also to the teachers of English about in learning and teaching English stops to help learners of English improve their competence of communicating efficiently with native speakers Therefore, it is essential to carry out an investigation into the pronunciation of English stops experienced

by the students at Tuy Hoa Industrial College I hope that this study could provide a fresh perspective on pronunciation as a curriculum area in language learning and teaching

1.2 AIMS, OBJECTIVES AND QUESTIONS OF THE STUDY

1.2.1 Aims

This study has been developed with the aim of helping students at Tuy Hoa Industrial College in particular and learners of English in general improve their pronunciation of English stops with the solutions to overcome their common pronunciation mistakes of these sounds

1.2.2 Objectives

This study is intended to:

- Describe and compare the English and Vietnamese stops

- Discover the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese stops

- Find out some causes and common mistakes made by students at Tuy Hoa Industrial College in performing the English stops

- Suggest some solutions to mistake correction in pronunciation of English stops experienced by the students as well as activities to enhance their performance of these sounds

1.2.3 Questions of the study

To achieve the aims and objectives mentioned above, this study tries to answer the following questions

1 What are the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese stops?

2 What are common mistakes made by students at Tuy Hoa Industrial College in performing English stops?

3 What causes those mistakes?

4 What are the effective ways and activities that teachers of English

at colleges can apply to correct and improve students’ pronunciation of English stops?

1.3 THE SCOPE OF THE STUDY

This study just focuses on examining the perception and production of English stops / p, b, t, d, k, / by students In this study, the students at Tuy Hoa Industrial College would be chosen as the representative informants 1.4 DEFINITION OF TERMS

Stops or plosives are consonant sounds produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract then separating rapidly The term “plosive” is reserved for oral (non- nasal) stops Plosives include / p, b, t, d, k, / [6:7, 20:130]

1.5 ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY

Chapter 1, Introduction, consists of the rationale, the aims and objectives, the scope of the study, research questions and definitions of terms and also the organization of the study

Chapter 2, Literature and Theoretical background, provides a brief literature review and theoretical knowledge for the matters of study

Chapter 3, Research design and Methodology, presents the research method, the hypotheses and the procedure of data collection and analysis

Chapter 4, Findings and Discussion, discusses in the result of the data analysis, then draws causes of making mistakes In this chapter, the activities which can be applied to improve students’ pronunciation are also included

Chapter 5, Conclusion and Recommendations, gives brief conclusion of the study Besides, it also includes recommendations for improving students’ pronunciation

Chapter 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 REVIEW OF THE PREVIOUS STUDIES

According to Lightbown and Spada (1996), a child’s language acquisition is mainly based on imitation, practice and innate capacities without paying attention to the knowledge of phonetics In contrast, adolescence and adult learners’ process of second language learning is not the same due to their developmental changes in the brain In order to achieve the goal of pronouncing as closely as native speakers, the learners need to be provided good knowledge of the English sounds This may possibly contribute to the fact that apart from the course-books designed for only speech training with little information on how a speech sound is produced, most writers have discussed the articulation of speech sounds with details, especially the issues of English stops

In an early study of English speech sounds, Connor (1973) dealt with the stops by starting with the English phonemes rather than concrete sounds

In his study, the phonemes were focused on the variety of sounds by which they are realized In a practical view, Roach (1983) made a contrast between the minimal pairs of English stops which can help the learners have distinction between /p/ and /b/, /t/ and /d/, and / k/ and / / He also studied their distribution and variants

In a view of error analysis, Ladefoged (1982) introduced some important general phonetic notions of English stops He analyzed specific mistakes of English stops which foreign learners often encounter and showed how to produce these sounds correctly in particular cases

In the aspect of teaching pronunciation, Kenworthy (1992) focused on the specific problems encountered by speakers of Arabic, Chinese, French, German, etc And he also examined the areas of difficulty in terms of learning and teaching strategies However, in this study, he has not addressed the problems which Vietnamese learners often meet in pronouncing English stops

Research on phonetics and phonology by Carr (1999) described English stops and gave the detailed distinction between aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops which is phonemic in Korean but allophonic in English The distinction is also held true for Vietnamese, although he did not give any concern to Vietnamese

More specifically, Gimson (1970) carefully described how to pronounce English stops The highlights of his study were the advice giving parts to foreign learners This material is not only useful for learners of English but also for my study as the reference and guideline

Martha C Pennington (1993), in research “Realizations of English final stops by Chinese speakers in Taiwan” discussed problems that learners may have with the pronunciation of English stops, and proposed some pedagogical implications concerning this group of sounds

All in all, those studies have mostly examined production of English stops and a few of them have mentioned about the contrastive information concerning Vietnamese Only in a recent cross-linguistic study, Giang (2003) investigated the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese stops and discussed the problems of English stops encountered by the students

at Danang University This research was really valuable for me to help shaping my hypotheses and for reference

Accordingly, we seek more solutions to help the Vietnamese learner of English to perform their speaking as close to native speakers as possible In this study we did not require the students to produce the sounds sequences with exact pronunciation as native speakers, but in somewhat like native speakers’ pronunciation and intelligible

2.2.1 The production mechanism of stops in English and Vietnamese

All languages have pulmonic stops and the normal mechanism is pulmonic egressive, that is, with air flowing outward from the lungs

The complete articulation of a pulmonic egressive, plosive or stop consonant consists of three stages:

1 The closing stage, during which the articulating organs move together in order to form the obstruction; in this stage, there is often an on-glide or transition audible in a preceding sound segment and visible in an acoustic analysis as a characteristic curve of the formants of the preceding sound

2 The holding or compression stage, during which lung action compresses the air behind the closure; this stage may or may not be accompanied by voice, i.e., vibration of the vocal cords

3 The release or explosion stage, during which the organs forming the obstruction part rapidly, allowing the compressed air to escape abruptly; if stage (2) is voiced, the vocal cord vibration may continue in stage (3); if stage (2) is voiceless, stage (3) may also be voiceless (aspiration) before silence or before the onset of voice ( as for a following vowel), or stage (3) may coincide with the onset of vocal cord vibration, as when a voiceless plosive is followed without intervening aspiration by a vowel; again, an

off-glide or transition associates the plosive with a following sound [8:150]

The description of the production mechanism above is just a general one because each sound in this group will have different phonetic variants when it is distributed in different positions in a word

2.2.2 Contrastive analysis of stop consonants in English and Vietnamese

Apart from using knowledge of our students and our ears in order to be aware of their pronunciation problems, it is also useful to have some prior knowledge of what elements of English phonetics and phonology are likely to cause problems to the Vietnamese learners of English

2.2.2.1 Similarities

As we have mentioned above, all languages in the world have stops In English and Vietnamese, the consonant system of stops consists of six members: /b/, /p/, /t/, /d/, /k/, / / and each of them has different places of articulation (see Table 2.1 below)

Table 2.1 The articulation of stops

Basically speaking, both English and Vietnamese stops have the same production mechanism They are divided into three pairs, as we have seen, according to the manner of articulation Members of each pair can be distinguished on voiceless and voiced features

MANNER OF ARTICULATION Bilabial Alveolar Velar

2.2.2.2 Differences

As mentioned above, the production mechanism of the stops in English and Vietnamese is similar in general; however when distributed in different contexts of words or in connected speech, English stops are affected by the surrounding sounds and undergo some changes As a result, each stop in English has it own phonetic variants, which foreign learners of English, especially Vietnamese learners hardly recognize in speaking and listening

Firstly, in Vietnamese, final stops neither have a release burst nor have

a nasal release whereas English final stops are often produced with these phonetic features (with audible or no audible release)

Secondly, the English and Vietnamese stops are distributed differently due to the phonetic systems of both languages as described in Table 2.2 and Table 2.3 Examine Table 2.2 and Table 2.3 below we can have some comments as follows:

English stops are distributed in different positions in words, while Vietnamese does not have a voiceless stop [p] in the initial position Therefore, Vietnamese learners may fail to correctly pronounce the voiceless stops [p] in this position They may produce the word “pen” like “Ben” because they might not pay attention to the force of articulation /p/ is produced with a stronger breath effort than /b/

Table 2.2 The distribution of English stops [8:151]

Stops

Position

middle lopping lobbing bitter bidder postcard beginning

Table 2.3 The distribution of Vietnamese stops [3:153, 226]

Furthermore, /p/, /t/, /k/ in English have the phonetic variants [p ], [t ], [k ] in the initial position as “the fortis series /p, t, k /, when initial in an accented syllable, are usually accompanied by aspiration.” [8:151], whereas [p ], [t ], [k ] in Vietnamese are not allophones of /p/, /t/, /k/ That is, in Vietnamese, [p], [t] and [k] are realization of the /p/, /t/ and /k/ morphemes and [p ], [t ] and[k ] are realization of the distinct /p /, /t and /k / morphemes If the learners do not pay particular attention to this phonetic feature, they may raise a risk of causing misunderstanding For example, instead of pronouncing [p n] for the word “pin” Vietnamese learners pronounce [pin], which listeners may understand as “bin”

Figure 2.1 English voiceless stop phonemes

(Adapted from [6:38])Another feature that makes English stops different from Vietnamese

stops is consonant cluster “Consonant cluster is a group of consonants with

no intervening vowel”[10] In English consonant clusters such as [pl], [bl],

[dr], [ l] … are very popular It is quite difficult for Vietnamese learners of

English to pronounce English consonant clusters because of no habit of

pronouncing these sounds in their mother tongue They tend to insert the

vowel / / after / p, b, d, k, / followed by / l, r / For example, they may

pronounce the word “class” [klas] like [k las]

Last but not least, Vietnamese learners of English hardly recognize the

influence of English stops on the length of the preceding sounds The vowels

and even consonants closed by lenis / b, d, / are often produced longer than

those closed by fortis / p, t, k / For example, the words “bad” and “bat” are

transcripted as [b d] and [b t] Look at the transcriptions of the two words,

the vowel / / seems to be pronounced the same, but the vowel / / in “bad”

is, in fact, longer than the one in “bat” “We could not symbolize the length

difference in a phonemic transcription because it is a conditioned difference:

whenever a fortis consonant follows in such words the preceding vowel is

shorter than when a lenis follows” [20:189] Accordingly, Vietnamese

learners may perform these sounds incorrectly

2.2.3 Syllable structure in English and Vietnamese

“Words can be cut up into units called syllables”[12] A word contains

at least one syllable Most speakers of English have no trouble dividing a word up into its component syllables Sometimes how a particular word is divided might vary from one individual to another, but a division is always easy and always possible For example, the word “tomato” is divided into three syllables [t a t ]

A syllable is a unit of sound composed of a central peak of sonority (usually a vowel), and the consonant that cluster around this central peak

A syllable (σ) has its own internal structure: it can be divided into sub syllabic parts as onset (O) and rhyme (R) within the rhyme we find the nucleus (N) and coda (Co) Not all syllables have all parts; the smallest possible syllable contains a nucleus only A syllable may or may not have an onset and a coda

The general structure of a syllable consists of the following segments which are shown in Figure 2.1

Onset (obligatory in some languages, optional or even restricted in others) is the beginning sounds of the syllable; the ones preceding the nucleus These are always consonants in English The nucleus is a vowel in most cases, although the consonants [ r ], [ l ], [ m ], [ n ], and the velar nasal (the 'ng' sound) can also be the nucleus of a syllable In the following words, the onset is in bold; the rest underlined: card, drop, strain If a word contains more than one syllable, each syllable will have the usual syllable parts: win.dow, to.ma.to, pre.pos.te.rous, fun.da.men.tal

Rhyme (or rime) is the rest of the syllable, after the onset The rhyme can also be divided up: Rhyme = nucleus + coda Nucleus is obligatory in all languages Coda (optional in some languages, highly restricted or prohibited

in others)

Vietnamese syllables are constructed as other languages However, it has a very strict structure with the presence of tone (T)

Figure 2.3 Internal structure of a syllable in Vietnamese

(Adapted from [1:46])

σ

Unlike English, Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language Syllables often coincide with words They consist of two mandatory components: a tone and a nuclear vowel The syllables may also contain two optional components: an initial consonant and a final consonant or semivowel The initial consonant may or may not be accompanied by a secondary labial articulation Furthermore, O consists of only one consonant, whereas in English, O may consists of more than one consonant (clusters) In addition, there are clear-cut borderlines between words and each syllable ends without releasing the final sounds, which could raise difficulties to Vietnamese learners of English They may tend to delete the final sounds and may forget connecting words in natural speech The possible negative transfer of the phonetic features stops in Vietnamese syllabic structure is one of the serious causes which make Vietnamese learners of English take no notice of the assimilation and the liaison i.e the linking of a final consonant in the preceding word to the initial vowel of the following word In term of fluency, they may not be successful in performing as well as perceiving sounds in connected speech

2.3 SUMMARY

The chapter reviews some previous studies which are related to the topic of the research In addition, the contrastive analysis between English and Vietnamese stops in terms of phonetic features in consonant systems and syllabic structure gives an overview of the differences of stops in the two language systems which can interfere second learners’ language learning process, from which the researcher could draw some assumptions of potential mistakes that Vietnamese learners of English may have

Chapter 3 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY

3.1 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHOD

In this study, the qualitative and quantitative analysis method is used on the basics of predictive contrastive analysis of English as the target language and Vietnamese as the source language The study starts with some hypotheses drawn from the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese and our observation on the students’ mistakes and their difficulties in pronouncing English stops These hypotheses will be verified with the help of qualitative and quantitative evidence extracted from data collected from questionnaires, diagnostic test of the students’ perceptive skill and production skill (direct recording of their actual performance) All the data were then analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively Qualitative information consists of kinds of mistakes made by the students and quantitative information is frequency of making mistakes, the number of the students making mistakes and the rates of the number of the students to be tested

2 They may fail to pronounce English stops correctly by transferring habits of pronouncing Vietnamese stops in Vietnamese words

3 They may fail to correctly pronounce vowels followed by a voiced or voiceless English stops

3 3 SUBJECT SELECTION AND DESCRIPTION

The subjects involved in the research are the first year students selected randomly from the classes at Tuy Hoa Industrial College with groups of different levels The informants are non-specializing English students who are required of having studied English for at least three years at high schools This subject selection of the study is based on the following reasons

Firstly, according to the school syllabus, non-specializing English students only study English in the first, the second and the third semesters Therefore, it is necessary to carry out the investigation into the first year students

Secondly, the informants were divided into groups of different levels according to their background of studying English before entering the college (three years, seven years and more than seven years) to serve the purpose of the study: how to teach students of different levels to learn and practise pronunciation of English stops effectively

Thirdly,the subject was chosenin order to help the students overcome the problems of stops pronunciation as soon as they begin their English lessons at colleges

Last but not least, the subject of the study would help provide some necessary information about students’ background and attitudes towards learning and practicing pronunciation in general and English stops in particular, which contributes to the conducting of the survey of study

Table 3.1 Group description

3 5 PROCEDURE

The study was carried out with the following steps:

1 Review the relevant documents, books and theses to set forth the hypotheses basing on the preliminary contrastive information

2 Deliver the questionnaires and collect the data to test the hypotheses about the students’ situation of learning

3 Implement the diagnostics tests from isolated words, sentences to free talks that contain problematic sounds on production skill (recording students’ actual performance) and on perceptive skill to collect the data

4 Analyze the datato get the evidence to test the hypotheses

5 Discuss the result of findings

6 Suggest solutions to the problems to improve the matter of the study

3.6 METHOD OF DATA COLLECTION

The data of the study were obtained using 2 measurement instruments: survey with questionnaires and diagnostic test

The questionnaires were issued to the population of 100 students at Tuy Hoa Industrial College In order not to make the students get confused, the researcher gave careful explanation of all the questions posed to the students Moreover, the students had as much time as they need to think over the questions before they could make final decisions on the options or to show their point of view to open-ended questions (See Appendix A for the design

of the questionnaire.)

The diagnostic test was designed to test both of the students’ perceptive skill and production skill (See Appendix B for the design of the diagnostic test.)

With the researcher’s intention, part 1 was to test the students’ perception of the stops In this part, the students were required to listen to the sentences with words containing stops which seemed to cause potential problems

Part 2 was for testing the students’ actual performance of producing English stops The students were tested with three kinds of tests The first test was tended to test how the students perform minimal pairs which contain stops The second contained a sentence list to test their performance in the aspect of connected speech And the third was designed to test their performance of the stops in connected speech by talking about a chosen topic

naturally 30 students were chosen as representative informants of the three different levels

The word list in part one consists of 8 sentences for testing the students’ perception skill of sounds /b /and /p/, 7 sentences for /t/ and /d/, and

7 sentences for /k/ and / / The word list in Section 1 Part 2 consists of 6 pairs

of words for each minimal pair of phonemes This test is designed to examine the following dimensions (See Table 3.2 below)

Table 3.2 Requirements of the minimal pair test

Table 3.3 Requirements of the sentence test

$ % " & ' (

$ % " & ' ()* $ & '$(

+ ", "# ' (- $ % " & ' (+ ", "# " * * "/ ', 0*1( ! "# ', *1(

2 "# ' (

)* $ & ' (+ ", "# ' (+ ", "# ' (+ ", "# ' (- $ % " & ' (All the words and sentences in section one and two were taken out from the books “Sounds English” by J D O’ Connor and Fletcher and “Ship or Sheep” by Ann Baker which makes the assessment and evaluation on the data collecting reliable.For each section (section one and section two in part two)

of the test, the students were asked to read aloud the words and sentences so that the recording could be made

The topic list in section three, part two consists of 5 topics which are about things and people around them This section was considered the most important part of the diagnostic test because language is not just appeared in isolated words According to Pennington “language is produced and interpreted with reference to a larger meaningful context” [17], therefore, the students were asked to talk freely about one of the topics in the topic list in order to test if they could perform English stops in connected speech or not

In the scope of the study, all the recordings were then analyzed and focussed on the mistakes of the stops only

3.7 DATA COLLECTION

The data collection was executed on the subjects mentioned above The questionnaires were delivered to the students in May, 2007 after they had had nearly ten months of getting accustomed to their learning environment at the college The diagnostic test was administered in June, 2007 on the ground of the determined research design methodology

The collecting of the corpus was carried out in four stages:

Stage 1: The students were asked to pronounce the minimal pairs in the word list after having 3 minutes to read through it;

Stage 2: The students were asked to read each sentence in the sentence list after having 3 minutes to read through it;

Stage 3: Each of the students were asked to talk freely about a topic they chose from the topic list after having 10 minutes to prepare and write notes that was necessary for their talk;

Stage 4: The students were asked to listen to the tape and underline the words they heard on the hand-outs delivered

The diagnostic test was all recorded with the software “Polderbit Sound Recorder and Sound Editor Version 4.0.0.90” and a microphone (Salar Somic) connected to a laptop (hp) The recordings would make it possible for the students’ performance to be transcribed, and then be collated with the version produced by the English model tape as the baseline data In addition, the study took advantage of effective software “Goldwave” and “Speech Analyzer 2.2 and 2.7” which can measure the phonic production of students The test and transcription were completed at the end of June 2007

3.8 DATA ANALYSIS

Data analysis was carried out using the procedure of tallying frequencies, recording the results, presenting the data in frequency and percentage distribution tables, and analyzing and interpreting the data in the light of the research objectives

The first survey part was assessed in the following categories:

1 Students’ background (the length of their English learning process and their background)

2 Students’ attitude toward learning English (their interest and attention

to the skill as well as their energy of pronunciation practice)

3 Teachers’ method and course books (the teacher and material roles in teaching and learning English pronunciation)

4 Students’ knowledge of English stops and difficulties (students’ difficulties and causes to the problem)

The data collected from this part were used to provide the preliminary informationabout the causes of students’ difficulties and also to give evidence

to the hypotheses

Because the purpose of the study is to teach and to learn pronunciation effectively in classes of different levels, the data collected in the second part was analyzed according to three groups as described in the previous part.The second component of the diagnostic test was made to check the students’ actual performance in pronouncing the stops in isolated words and sentences and then in free talks It is inevitable to accept that the students could make other kinds of pronunciation mistakes, but we did not take such mistakes into consideration The mistakes were examined and totalled up to reinforce the hypotheses Accordingly, the students’ actual performance was judged with qualitative and quantitative dimensions by recording, listening and comparing carefully with the native speakers’ version Along with this part, the demonstration of the performance with the help of computer software like

“Speech Analyzer” and “Goldwave” were used to support our decisions on students’ errors (as shown in Figure 3.1.a and Figure 3.1.b)

Figure 3.1.a Audio signal of the word “pen”

performed by a student

Figure 3.1.b Audio signal of the word “pen”

performed by a native speaker 3.9 VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY

The data collection was carried out with 100 students taking part in the questionnaires and 30 students in performing their pronunciation in terms of perceptive and productive skill These students were divided into three groups

to make the collation and verification more reliable However, although the students were selected in three groups of different levels and backgrounds, they were required to do the same diagnostic test They were treated equally because they have to follow the same syllabus at the college without mentioning their abilities Also, we administered the research among the non-specializing English students at Tuy Hoa Industrial College only, which cannot be generalized to all the students at colleges This is also the limitation

of the study Nevertheless, the research was carried out objectively on the data collected without the researcher’s interference So the results of the findings and recommendations might meet the demand of pronunciation teaching and learning at colleges

Chapter 4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS This chapter presents the results of the research statistically and discusses them to verify the hypotheses relating to the objectives mentioned

in chapter one In order to improve the current situation, the facts and figures

of pronunciation learning and teaching as well as the students’ actual performance of English stops will be showed in detail with the help of the information collected from the questionnaires and the diagnostic test

4.1 PRESENTATION OF THE RESULTS

4.1.1 Data collected from the students’ questionnaires

4.1.1.1 Students’ background

Table 4.1 Information about students’ background

Information Participants Percentage Total

Dwelling

school The rest (5%) got to know English when they entered the college These students had already studied French before With students’ different levels of English as a foreign language, it is predicted that these students would confront with many different problems in English learning and acquisition

4.1.1.2 Students’ attitude toward English learning and pronunciation learning

The analysis of data from the questionnaires helps us sketch a descriptive picture of the practice of teaching and learning of the students in Tuy Hoa Industrial College

Table 4.2 Information about students’ attitude toward English learning

and pronunciation Information Participants Percentage Total

as a means of communication while English learning is considered to learn through conversation Only 5% among them often speak English

Surprisingly, when being asked about their frequency of practicing pronunciation at home only one student (1%) said that he practiced pronunciation everyday and 5% practice 2-6 times a week while there are a large number of students who confessed that they only practiced pronunciation once week (63%) and 31% never spent time to practice pronunciation at home Among 69% of the students who confessed of having

at least once a week to practice pronunciation at home, 16% stated that they even never used cassette players to help practicing According to the result in table 4.2, when the students got to answer the question of which language skill ranks first in terms of importance, the numbers of the students who thought that speaking, reading, writing skills were the most important of all are relatively equal (reading 33%, followed by speaking 32% and writing 29%, while only 6% choose listening as the skill that has a central place in the learning of second language) The result drawn from the questionnaires shows that students seem to make light of listening in their process of learning English In order to communicate successfully in oral interaction, it is necessary to own the skills of both listening and speaking

Obviously, much as students all didn’t spend much time on practicing pronunciation 45% of them paid most attention to vocabulary and 48% to grammatical structures whereas only a small percentage of them spent their energy on learning pronunciation (7%)

4.1.1.3 Teachers’ method and course books

Table 4.3 Information of teachers and course books’ roles

in pronunciation practice

Role of course books

In addition, pronunciation is not highly regarded as vocabulary or grammar structures As shown from the table, a large proportion of them

thought that teachers paid much attention to vocabulary (97%) and grammar (100%) while pronunciation was considered the item that teachers paid the least attention to teach (23%).The coincidence of the results when being asked about the skill of most importance and the skill teachers pay most attention to teach shows the relation as well as the effect between teachers’ attitude toward pronunciation teaching and students’ thoughts

According to the results shown in Table 4.3, teachers seem to get acquainted with the traditional method of teaching pronunciation They often uses their voice to teach (100%); i.e they use repetition drills Using modern facilities to help practice is not familiar to them.32% of them had experience with cassette players More surprisingly, none of them used videos or recorders to help pronunciation practice

According to the results drawn from the questionnaires given to 100 students, all of teachers do correct student’s pronunciation mistakes of English sounds However, the frequency of mistake correction is not really high The largest proportion falls on “sometimes” (62%) followed by “often” (38%) and “very often” gets a small rate (only 10%) Besides, pronunciation mistake correction is done by teachers (100%), by peers (38%) and by themselves (10%)

4.1.1.4 Students’ knowledge of English stops and problems

Table 4.4 Information of students’ knowledge and problems

More than two thirds of the students do not know how to pronounce English stops (73%) They may pronounce English stops as their mother tongue or experience of imitating teachers The rest said yes As described in Table 4.4, the students seem to pay no attention to the aspect of connected speech 79% of the students said that they did not release final stops and 81 %

of them did not care the linking sounds

More importantly, much of the students often made mistakes when producing minimal pairs (89%) and failed to pronounce final stops (85%) This problem makes them fail to communicate successfully

4.1.1.5 Causes of students’ difficulties

The results in Table 4.5 show that students got so many different difficulties in learning and practicing pronunciation The most significant

point to notice is that 78% of the participants respectively claim the differences between English phonetic system and Vietnamese phonetic system, which constitutes the highest percentage Lack of materials (63%), and lack of suitable facilities (75%) are the next two causes that they have to confront 54% and 57% expressed that they did not have enough opportunity

to practice with classmates and teachers And it is not strange when 67% of them admitted that they never have chance to speak with native speakers Besides, participants, to some extent, think that the current teaching methods are not quite suitable for pronunciation learning as it is so boring that it does not interest students (20%) Another factor that constitutes the pronunciation problems encountered is time limitation (29%)

Table 4.5 Information of causes of students’ difficulties

Causes of difficulties Participants Percentage

Little opportunity to practice with

The differences between English

phonetic system and Vietnamese

phonetic system

4.1.2 Data collected from the students’ perception and recordings

As mentioned in chapter three, the data of the study are collected not only from the questionnaire but also from the diagnostic tests on both of the students’ perception and performance to have a clear description of students’

actual pronunciation Due to the time limitation, the number of students in the diagnostic test is reduced to 30 students of three groups while 100 students are required to do the questionnaire

Due to the tables’ space consuming, all tables presents the results were put into the Appendix section Table 4.6 shows the problems that students often face in listening Much of the students could not distinguish between initial /p/ and /b/ That explained why the students of three groups (50% of the students in group “3 years”, 43.75% in group “7 years” and 50% in group

“over 7 years”) choose “bet” instead of “pet” Also, the final stops are not easy for them at all They did not recognize the different length between the vowels preceding them and the more audible release of voiced stops /b, d, / with less audible release of voiceless stops /p, t, k/ This can be seen clearly from the results of sentence 7(/p-b/), 4, 5, 6, 7 (/t-d/) and 6, 7(/k- /) in Table 4.6 Besides, there are a very small number of students who made mistakes in recognition between /k/ and / /, /t/ and /d/ in the initial position However, some of them got confused between /k/ and / / followed by /l/

Table 4.7 summarizes the results of student’s performance in isolated words The results of their performance reveal many kinds of mistakes within the stops Students did not have the habits of pronouncing the aspirated [p] Therefore, their pronunciation sounded like /b/ and vice verse 15 production

of “Ben” which was pronounced partially devoiced [b] with fortis articulation sounded like voiceless [p] The table also reveals that the final stops seemed not to be present in their performance With these minimal pairs, their pronunciation has little or even no difference On the other hand, the dimensions of vowel lengthening and shortening appeared the most difficult problem Only some of them performed these pairs correctly One more kind

of mistakes that should be mentioned here is the insertion of schwa after stops followed by / l, r/ except for /t/ This kind of mistakes was made when they could not move quickly from /p, b, d, k, / to /l, r/

Table 4.8 gives the results of the students’ sentence performance According to the table, the researcher paid most attention to the aspect of connected speech to assess their speech Linking appeared to be one of the most problematic one Clearly seen from the table, most of the students failed

to perform the liking sounds due to having no habits of releasing final stops

Table 4.9 bears the same resemblance to table 4.8 In terms of connected speech, they dropped nearly all the final stops, especially in clusters and none of them paid attention to the linking and assimilation (labialization and velarization) of the stops

4.2 DISCUSSIONS OF THE RESULTS

4.2.1 Common mistakes made by students:

4.2.1.1 Common mistakes in terms of production

The results on the students’ performance in three stages of three groups provided some useful information for the study

The first common mistake which should be put into consideration is that most of them get confused with the pronunciation of /p/ and /b/, which really makes listeners strained This may be due to the students’ lack of knowledge of aspirated [p] in the initial position Some of them pronounced aspirated [p] correctly by chance without awareness of this Besides, English stop /p/ does not have its Vietnamese equivalent in the initial position which may be a mistake source Within this minimal pair, they still make mistakes when pronounce partially devoiced [b] in the initial position Their

pronunciation of [b] sounds like voiceless, unaspirated [p] (See Figure 4.1.a and Figure 4.1.b)

Figure 4.1.a The demonstration of sound wave and spectrogram of the words

“pen” and “Ben” performed by a native speaker

Figure 4.1.b The demonstration of sound wave and spectrogram of the words

“pen” and “Ben”, performed by a student Figure 4.1.a gives us a clear distinction between initial [p] and [b] The native speaker pronounces [b] with partially devoicing, whereas Vietnamese students perform it with almost voiceless variant

It is noteworthy that among the students of this study, the insertion of schwa after stops followed by /l, r/ are common strategies Examine Figure 4.2.a and Figure 4.2.b; it is not so strange when Vietnamese students make

such mistakes because there is no equivalent in Vietnamese That explains why they insert the schwa to make their speech more naturally This bad habit not only causes troublesome to the listeners in terms of perception but also to their comprehension

Figure 4.2.a The demonstration of sound wave and spectrogram of

the word “class” performed by a student

Figure 4.2.b The demonstration of sound wave and spectrogram of the words

“class” performed by a native speaker According to the rule of articulation in cluster, whenever some sonorant consonants such as [r], [l] stand behind voiceless obstruents in particular

plosives, and these sounds are pronounced to be devoiced However, some students seemed to be unconscious to their ever habit of schwa epenthesis that they made their clusters clearer and clearer They, therefore, had [k las] for

“class” instead of [klas]

An additional interesting finding is that for some students, it is hard to recognize minimal pairs like “pup” and “pub” We can see clearly through the sound waves of “pup” and “pub” performed by a student and a native speaker (Figure 4.3.a and Figure 4.3.b) Only a few of them could perform the

“released” feature of stops in final position correctly As discussed in the previous chapter, these kinds of mistakes are due to the differences between the two languages There is a higher frequency of deletion over epenthesis (See Appendix F) This indicates that students do not pay any attention to releasing the final stops, which brings about other mistakes With isolated minimal pairs, final stops are already difficult for them to perform Thereby, this turns to be a great hindrance to them on the way of reaching accuracy as well as fluency in their natural speech

Figure 4.3.a The demonstration of sound wave and spectrogram of the words

“pup” and “pub” performed by a student

Figure 4.3.b The demonstration of sound wave and spectrogram of the words

“pup” and “pub” performed by a native speaker One more kind of mistakes that should be mentioned is that they cannot get accuracy when pronouncing vowels preceding stops This is not Vietnamese students’ problem but also learners of English Figure 4.4.a and Figure 4.4.b could illustrate this mistake This problem can be derived from the dropping and not releasing of final stops and also the differences between the two languages’ distribution In Vietnamese, there is no voiced stop in the final position That explains why learners could not or hardly see the different length of vowel

Figure 4.4.a The demonstration of sound wave and spectrogram of the words

“write” and “ride” performed by a native speaker

Figure 4.4.b The demonstration of sound wave and spectrogram of the words

“write” and “ride” performed by a student

In communication we do not utter isolated sounds in isolated words but

in an continuous stream With this aspect, people involved in conversation should obtain both accuracy and fluency Unfortunately, the strong influence

of the mother tongue hinders them from fluency as well as accuracy; they dropped all of the final stops and have tendency to enunciate every word that appears in their mind (See Figure 4.5.a and Figure 4.5.b) With native speakers, linking and assimilation are the two aspects that make their speech natural Native speakers assimilate and link words to avoid awkward sound combinations which would lead to loss of oral fluency with utterances sounding broken up and clumsy, whereas, Vietnamese learners seem hard to acquire these skills There are many factors occupying their mind when making their speech They may, at the same time, try to find suitable words, use correct grammar and pursue the flow of ideas, etc Consequently, they forget linking sounds, assimilating sounds in connected speech

[ h : : : ]

Figure 4.5.a The demonstration of sound wave and spectrogram of the

sentence “ How many cups of tea and coffee do you drink each day?”

performed by a native speaker

[ h : : : : : ]

Figure 4.5.b The demonstration of sound wave and spectrogram of the

sentence “How many cups of tea and coffee do you drink each day?”

performed by a student

In conclusion, Vietnamese learners of English are likely to encounter many problems within English stops The results of the study do support hypothesis 1, 2, and 3