Difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of secondyear English major students at Thuongmai University

Difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of secondyear English major students at Thuongmai University Difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of secondyear English major students at Thuongmai University Difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of secondyear English major students at Thuongmai University Difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of secondyear English major students at Thuongmai University Difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of secondyear English major students at Thuongmai University Difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of secondyear English major students at Thuongmai University Difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of secondyear English major students at Thuongmai University Difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of secondyear English major students at Thuongmai University Difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of secondyear English major students at Thuongmai University Difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of secondyear English major students at Thuongmai University Difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of secondyear English major students at Thuongmai University

ABSTRACT It is easy to see how important English is all over the world Many international companies conduct meetings in English, universities offer classes in English, and visitors and travelers all over the world use English as a popular language English is the most commonly spoken language in the world One out of five people can speak or at least understand English Among four skills in English, speaking seem to be paid great attention of English learners However, it’s no surprise that there are loads of problems Vietnamese speakers have with English pronunciation Therefore, to improve speaking skills in English communication, Vietnamese students should find out the difficulties in their pronunciation This study will go into the pronunciation difficulties encountered by second-year students of English faculty at Thuongmai University In other words, this study will explore students' difficulties with sounds that are not in the Vietnamese phonetic system Problems with written form and spoken form inconsistencies is also mentioned here Difficulty in pronunciation also comes from word stress and the influences of the local language on English learners The data from the survey are conducted by the second-year of English faculty at Thuongmai University through questionnaire and audio record to collect essential information Besides, the results of the study revealed the most applied English pronunciation improvement method among students In addition, the study also provides the strategies for both students and teachers in terms of English pronunciation ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS During the progress of conducting my graduation paper, I could not complete it if I did not have supports and guidance from our supervisor and friends, including the English second-year students surveyed Foremost, I would like to express my deeply sincere gratitude to my advisor, Mrs Pham Thuy Giang, M.A, for her guidance and precious comments she gave throughout my research I am in the beginning of my career, I have not enough time to everything However, she was still tolerant of advising and clarifying all my misunderstanding whenever I asked Without her valuable advice and support, my graduation paper would have been impossible to be done on schedule Besides my advisor, I also want to send my thanks to our teachers in Thuongmai University who gave me the possibility to complete this thesis Additional, I need to thank my fellow – English freshmen in Thuongmai University Without them, I could not have overcome such times and concentrated on my study Last but not least, I would like to thank my family and friends for their support and encouraging me as I concentrated on writing and researching They have always played an important role in my life Without their encouragement, I would not have been able to complete this study TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii TABLE OF CONTENTS iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS .v LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS vi CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY .1 1.1 Rationale .1 1.2 Previous studies 1.3 Aims of the study 1.4 Research subjects 1.5 Scope of the study .4 1.6 Research methodology 1.7 Organization of the study CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Overview of pronunciation 2.1.1 Definitions 2.1.2 The importance of pronunciation .8 2.2 Pronunciation components 2.2.1 Vowel sounds 2.2.2 Consonant sounds 11 2.2.3 Word stress .14 2.3 International Phonetic Alphabet 14 2.4 Pronunciation difficulties 15 2.4.1 Difficulties in English sounds 15 2.4.2 Inconsistencies in written and spoken form 19 2.4.3 Difficulties in word stress 19 2.4.4 Local language influences .20 2.5 Strategies for improving English pronunciation 21 2.5.1 Listening from foreign sources 21 2.5.2 Learning about International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) 22 2.5.3 Repetitive practice 23 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH FINDINGS 24 3.1 Situation analysis 24 3.2 Data collection instruments .24 3.2.1 The survey questionnaire 24 3.2.2 The Audio Recording .24 3.3 Data collection procedures 25 3.4 Research findings 26 3.4.1 Findings from the survey questionnaire 26 3.4.2 Findings from the audio recordings 36 3.5 Discussion 38 3.5.1 Pronunciation difficulties 38 3.5.2 Strategies for improving English pronunciation 39 CHAPTER 4: RECOMMENDATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS .41 4.1 Summary of the study 41 4.2 Recommendations .41 4.2.1 Recommendations for students 41 4.2.2 Recommendations for teachers 43 4.3 Limitations of the study 45 4.4 Recommendations for further studies 46 CONCLUSION 47 REFERENCES VII APPENDICES IX LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS No Abbreviations TMU Abt No Explanation Thuongmai University About Number LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS Figure 2.1 Vowel sounds .9 Figure 2.2 Classification of vowel sounds 10 Figure 2.3 Consonants and vowels (Reprinted from Sound foundations 1994 by Adrian Underhill with kind permission of Macmillan Education, UK) 11 Figure 2.4 Diagram of the vocal tract 12 Figure 2.5 Classification of consonant sounds 14 Figure 2.6 The International Phonetic Alphabet .15 Figure 2.7 Examples of the 26 syllable-initial two-consonant clusters in words 18 Figure 2.8 Examples of the six syllable-initial three-consonant clusters in words 18 Chart 3.1 Hometowns of the students participating in the survey .26 Chart 3.2 Students’ assessment of importance of English skills 27 Chart 3.3 Student’s frequency of speaking English 28 Chart 3.4 Students’ assessment of difficulty level of English speaking factors 29 Chart 3.5 Students’ assessment of importance of pronunciation in speaking English 30 Chart 3.6 When students started to learn English pronunciation .31 Chart 3.7 Student’s experience in English pronunciation courses 32 Chart 3.8 Students’ difficulties in pronouncing vowels sounds 33 Table 3.1 Students’ difficulties in pronouncing English consonants 34 Table 3.2 Strategies for improving students’ pronunciation 35 Chart 3.9 Students' assessment of the most effective strategy 36 Table 3.3 The number of errors made in the reading aloud test 37 CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY 1.1 Rationale English is the popular language in the world and the number of people around the world using English is constantly increasing Up to now, there are more than 1.2 billion English speakers worldwide, including more than 350 million native speakers and the rest use English as a second language English is known as the international language of business, and it is true that that international trade expands every year and brings all countries in the world together In particular, Vietnam has been a member of WTO (World Trade Organization), using English plays an essential role in period of integration, as well as in the industrialization and modernization process of our country The importance of learning English has become more growing, when most multinational companies require a certain level of English proficiency from potential workers Therefore more and more people are learning English in order to get a position in a top company In most Vietnamese schools, besides science and social subjects, English is currently required as a compulsory subject At school, students focus on learning grammar to pass the final exam The English competency assessment of students have based mainly on the test scores on paper, including grammar and reading tasks Meanwhile, improving speaking skill for students has not been paid much attention, lead to a large number of students attending university with poor English speaking skill Literally, there are several factors that affect speaking English such as vocabulary, grammar, intonation,…, etc and pronunciation is considered as the most influential one During my observation I noticed that the difficulties in English pronunciation include four main factors Firstly, the English sound system has several sounds which Vietnamese not have Secondly, in Vietnamese, in order to pronounce word correctly, we just need to spell the written form of the word; meanwhile in English, it is impossible to pronounce it by spelling the word Lastly, word stress in English is difficult when Vietnamese is kind of language which has single syllable in every word In short, to be able to speak English correctly and fluently in order to communicate in an effective way, learners should not ignore the pronunciation practice In order to learn it effectively, learners should also pay attention to some of the difficulties in improving their pronunciation that they presumably encounter, as well as appropriate strategies to master English pronunciation Especially, for secondyear students of Faculty of English at Thuongmai University, it is even more important to understand it deeply Therefore, in order to study this topic in depth, the author made a decision to conduct the research entitled: “Difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of second-year English major students at Thuongmai University” Hopefully, this study will help students understand deeply about this issues that they have not noticed before and suggest some strategies to solve the problems and help them improve their pronunciation 1.2 Previous studies Many studies have been conducted to help learners realize the importance of English pronunciation as well as the variety of pronunciation problems they face They also will be helpful references with suggested strategies that will assist students in improving the pronunciation learning and developing their own successful learning methods in order to improve their pronunciation skill There have been previous studies that address the difficulties in learning English pronunciation in order to solve those problems Thus, I would like to rely on these studies as reference materials for my graduation paper According to the study by Komariah (2018)- with the title: “Promblems in pronouncing the English sounds faced by the students of SMPN Halong, Banjar”, the difficulties in English pronunciation can be caused by the absence of the sounds in their mother tongue There are some problems of learning English in Indonesia and pronunciation is one of the most difficult components in English This research utilized a qualitative approach of contrastive analysis The information was gathered from the voices of the students who were interviewed The researcher used a technique of recording, transcribing, and analyzing The following is how the data were examined by the researcher: comparing English sounds and students’ pronunciation, 2 deciding which consonant, vowel, and diphthong the students mispronounce, determining the students' difficulties in pronouncing English sounds, finding out the students' difficulties in pronouncing English sounds, and drawing a conclusion The participants in this study are Banjar ninth-grade students at SMPN Halong Finally, the study showed that the students of SMPN Halong had trouble pronouncing English consonant sounds (/ t /, / θ /, / ʃ /, / f /, / ʒ /, /d/), vowels (/ɒ/, /e/, /oʊ/) and diphthongs ( /eɪ/, /oʊ/, /ər /) The sound /θ/ is pronounced as /t/, /ʃ/ as /s/, /ɒ / as /u/, /oʊ/ as /aw/, /ʒ/ as /s/, while /t/, /eɪ /, /t/, /d/ and /ər/ are pronounced as they are written The second study was researched and written by Nguyen Thi Thu Thao (2007) The title of this study is: “ Difficulties for Vietnamese when pronouncing English (Final consonants)” The purposes of this study were: offering a systematic study of the articulation of final consonants of Vietnamese-accented English Firstly, the differences in final consonants of the two languages were considered in background research In the second part of that paper, recorded data and evaluations from native speakers were analyzed Difficulties and tendencies in informants’ final consonants and cluster pronunciation are synthesized into certain types The comprehensibility is worked in order to get a general assessment of how native-like Vietnamese speakers’ English final consonants are Data were collected from five informants with different Vietnamese accents and English proficiency both within and outside Vietnam, and then emailed to the researcher The results of the analyzed data were classified into three categories: single-final consonants existing in Vietnamese or close to Vietnamese, single final consonants unfamiliar to Vietnamese and final consonant clusters The assessment of native speakers was also included as part of the results 1.3 Aims of the study This study is about to point out the difficulties in English pronunciation of second-year English majored students at Thuongmai University to help them aware of its importance In addition it also suggests some solutions to each problem for both students and teachers 1.4 Research subjects All the related data were used to analyze for this study were gathered from Faculty of English at Thuongmai University by a survey questionnaire and audio recorded The questionnaire was distributed to 60 students at English Faculty, who were randomly selected Each informant comes from different regions, have different educational access, and different learning experiences Some of participants have had the opportunity to learn English for years by studying at school or attending extra courses Besides, there is also the number of students studying English for three years or less The questionnaire was designed to identify the students’ experiences of learning English, specifically the difficulties in learning English pronunciation From there, author determines the most popular method they apply to themselves to improve their own English pronunciation difficulties 1.5 Scope of the study There are many different difficulties that students may encounter in their pronunciation when speaking English However, this study does not aim to cover all the issues in pronouncing English With the time limitation, this research concentrates on the most common pronunciation difficulties of second-year English majored students at Thuongmai University The study was conducted on 50 second-year students of Faculty of English at Thuongmai University The writer hopes this research will be a useful material for second-year students of Faculty of English who concerns this issue and help them to improve their English pronunciation 1.6 Research methodology The main instrument used in the study to collect data was an online questionnaire survey and audio record test 1.6.1 Online questionnaire survey Online questionnaire survey is one of the most effective instruments for collecting data in social science It aims at identifying the attitude and difficulties of students towards English pronunciation, as well as the strategies they used to improve Secondly, they may have difficulty in correctly pronouncing words just by looking at the written form This is completely understandable for Vietnamese students, because with Vietnamese words, pronouncing a word simply needs to spell it in the written form of a word, however, in English that is not possible Thirdly, problems with word stress when pronouncing words with or more syllables is also the other worries of students Not putting the stress on the word is a common problem of students when speaking English To communicate clearly when speaking English, it is important for students to stress the correct syllable in each word Last but not least, some students who come from the suburbs of Hanoi may have difficulty with their local language Specifically, the most common problem is the confusion between /l/ and /n/ sounds Not only when speaking English but also when speaking Vietnamese, sometimes they also have difficulty in controlling the pronunciation of / l / and / n / in words 3.5.2 Strategies for improving English pronunciation Based on the solutions used by students as well as suggestions from students, the author offers the following strategies Firstly, the role of speaking skill is output and listening is input of language so listening from the standard sources is the key strategy for improving English pronunciation The choice of listening source is also quite important, as there will be dozens of free resources available to students when they want to practice listening The topic, speed, and vocabulary of the listening lessons should be appropriate to the listener so that learners can access information as well as avoid causing boredom because of difficulty listening Some reliable listening sources suggested by students are English songs, audios, news, podcasts, etc After being exposed to the standard language, the next strategy is to learn about the foundation of that pronunciation is the IPA By studying and understanding the pronunciation of each sound as well as the difference of each sound from the others and with the sound in Vietnamese, learners gradually have a clearer awareness of standard pronunciation 39 Pronunciation learning progress will become meaningless if students not practice regularly through some exercises or self-assessment Practicing Tongue Twister is also a great way to practice pronunciation without getting bored This is also a reading practice method for children 4-7 years old in the United States when they let their children practice pronunciation in their native language In addition, recording your own speech and regularly checking your pronunciation is also an effective solution to correct mistakes and improve speaking skill 40 CHAPTER 4: RECOMMENDATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS 4.1 Summary of the study To reach what the author aimed at this study; the study was divided into four part with their own purpose The first part briefly provided an useful overview of the study as well as the research methodology The second part covers the theories related to the study The third part presented author’s findings of the difficulties in English pronunciation of the second-year English majored students at Thuongmai University through the questionnaire and audio record This last chapter is some recommendations and suggestions to improve English pronunciation for English majored sophomore at Thuongmai University 4.2 Recommendations 4.2.1 Recommendations for students  Learning IPA for correct pronunciation When we look up the new word on the dictionary, the following information is provided: word types, phonetics, meanings and sometimes there will be examples If we not know the IPA we will miss the opportunity to read the standard phonetic of that word Just hearing that word from another person is sometimes difficult to figure out how to pronounce it correctly The IPA helps us with three important areas: place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicing The basics are: in order to make sounds, we need to manipulate the structure of our mouth, tongue, teeth, and throat We produce different sounds by manipulating our mouth, tongue, teeth, and throat to various places to induce some type of obstruction in the airflow The various obstructions help produce the various sounds In other words, what are the placements of our lips, teeth, tongue, and throat as we form these sounds? This is important because letters in English can have different phonetic sounds or no sound at all Therefore, spelling is not a reliable source for pronunciation 41  Learning the relationship between spelling and pronunciation of some common sounds It is known that there is no correlation between the spellings and pronunciation of words in English language, since the English alphabet comprises only 26 letters but the sounds 44 In almost, spellings or letters may be pronounced in more than one way and also in a variety of ways However, it is not really impossible just by looking at the spelling of word to be able to pronounce correctly There will still has some combination of letters in English represent some speech sounds Words with the group of letters "ea", “ee” with or syllables are usually pronounced as / i: / For example: Sea, seat, please, heat, teach, tree, green, teen, teeth But there are exceptions that "ea" and “ee” goes with "r" pronounced as / iə /, such as break, great, measure, beer, cheer, deer The suffix "-ese" refers to nationality or language commonly pronounced as / i: /, such as Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, etc Words with the group of letters "all", “au” and “aw” in one or two syllable words is usually pronounced / ɔː / For example: call, fall, small, audience, author, daughter, law, awful, awesome, draw, etc When it comes to /u:/ sound, words with the groups of letters “oo”, “ue”, “oe” or “ew” will usually be pronounced as / u: / For instance: food, zoo, cool, blue, shoe, clue, drew, crew, flew, etc All 44 sounds in the IPA have letter clusters that are usually pronounced for a specific sound However, learners of English must realize that there is no perfect correspondence in English between sounds (pronunciation) and letters (spelling) Since the English spelling system is irregular and complex, a letter or letter combination may represent more than one sound Therefore, to master English spelling and pronunciation, students must be familiar with all possible spelling rules and be aware of the various possible letter-sound combinations  Reviewing the word stress rules of English Similarly, to be able to pronounce correctly, the correct word stress is also a big factor in deciding you have good English speaking skills There will be rules to help us 42 understand where to put the correct stress without looking up the dictionary But not rely on them too much, because there are many exceptions Stress on first syllable is usually appeared on most 2-syllable nouns (present, export, china, table) and 2-syllable adjectives (slender, clever, happy, famous) With the verbs has syllables which usually has stress on the last syllable, for example: present, export, decide, begin Some words ending in -ic, -sion and -tion are usually put the stress on penultimate (second from end) syllable such us graphic, geographic, geologic, revelation, confusion, etc Some word ending in -cy, -ty, -phy, -gy and –al are usually put the stress on antepenultimate (third from end) syllable such as democracy, dependability, photography, geology, critical, geological, etc However, as mentioned, English is a combined language and is used in many countries so of course there will be exceptions in how to place the stress in words  Practicing with regular self-checking Regular practice is the key to helping students improve their speaking skills in a remarkable way In fact, if they cannot hear their pronunciation problem, it is hard to improve it Therefore, recording their speech and comparing it to native speakers, they will recognize their problem and change it One of the effective ways to improve English pronunciation is mimicking native speakers Creating yourself a standard English environment by listening foreigner’s programs, movies, music and repeating what students are hearing can help them improve their pronunciation Music is also a fantastic way to convey language, so they can listen and sing songs in English That also helps they relax as well as improve their intonation and rhythm 4.2.2 Recommendations for teachers  Combining listening teaching with pronunciation teaching It is very important to combine listening skills teaching while teaching pronunciation because these two skills are complementary Letting students listen English a lot will help shape in their mind the correct pronunciation of English, so that 43 when learning how to pronounce words, they have heard those sounds before, then learning pronunciation will be much easier However, it is very important to choose the listening source that is suitable for the student's level In order to practice listening well, students need to know all the vocabulary in the listening text, avoid the case that 50% are new words, then listening will become difficult For new words of the listening text, listen to that word separately and look up the phonetic on the dictionary and practice reading first After that, listen to the whole listening track  Teaching IPA with effective method The IPA is used in ESL to address pronunciation issues by isolating difficult vowel sounds, consonants or diphthongs As a useful tool, a lot of teachers have used the IPA in order to have a clear indication of what pronunciation issues a learner may have Teachers can incorporate activities while teaching an IPA to increase the interesting part of the unit:  Activity one: Pronunciation Maze using /z/ and /s/ Instructions: Find a way from start to finish You may not pass a square if the word contains the sound /z/ You can move horizontally (↔) or vertically (↕) only (English Pronunciation in use pg 17, 2003)  Activity two: Bingo Instructions: Give out the prepared cards Read out the words from the cards in random order Tick off the words so as to avoid repeating them twice When the player completes a horizontal or vertical line they shout BINGO! Lastly, have the winner read back the words and check (Pronunciation Games Mike Hancock CUP, 1995) 44  Giving feedback on the students’ pronunciation mistakes when they speak English To improve the accuracy of pronunciation, it is necessary to provide corrective feedback When teachers gives corrective feedback which is a step further by showing that if the correct form is provided, students may have the chance to compare their own production with that of another Giving feedback also encourages students to create the correct pronunciation of the word being mispronounced by their friend so that they can understand it and not make the same mistakes because they have already known and practiced saying the correct pronunciation of the word To summarize, corrective feedback is critical for motivating students to learn more since it not only provides comments or compliments but also informs students of their errors and provides the right one 4.3 Limitations of the study Although the study has certain strong points such as collection methods, namely interviews, survey questionnaires for students, it is clear that the study has a number of shortfalls due to limited time, a lack of sources, the researcher's skill, and other unexpected factors Therefore the result of this study might only reflect a part of pronunciation difficulties that students may face when speaking English There are 45 many things that need considering and investigating thoroughly Mistakes and shortcomings are unavoidable so any comments or extra contributions are welcome 4.4 Recommendations for further studies Because of the limitation, this study could not cover all of aspects of the study Besides, the study only focuses on difficulties and strategies for only second-year students at Thuongmai Univeristy in order to help them improve their speaking skill Furthermore, in order to achieve better results in future studies, the researcher should invite more participants and the data collection process In addition to survey questionnaires and audio records, observation is needed to get more convincing conclusions After conducting this study, the author found that the other subjects should be taken into consideration such as the intonation and the aspects of connected speech However, due to the lack of time and experience, the other difficulties should be analyzed in further studies Overall, despite the fact that the study cannot avoid the limitations, the research was conducted with the supervision's guidance and self-effort Any comments or criticism would be greatly appreciated in order to improve future research 46 CONCLUSION To summarize, this graduated paper has been conducted with the aim to investigate the difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of second-year English major students at Thuongmai university Moreover, English is used as the medium of communication in many international conferences (Nunan, 2003) With the position of a student of English Department in TMU, the fluency in English is taking for granted in fact Through this research the readers can know and understand the difficulties of sophomores in Faculty of English at TMU clearly In the last parts, the author analyzed and suggested strategies for improving this difficulties The author has expected that the results of the study may help the sophomores of English faculty in improving their abilities in pronouncing English correctly and as a result, they will particularly improve their speaking skill as well as academic achievement in general Moreover, the author has looked forward to see English second-year students gain more confidence while speaking English and they can chase their dreams later 47 REFERENCES Reference books: Adam, Fujii & Mackey (2005), English second language, Garland Publishing, Inc Albert Sydney Homby (2008), Oxford Advanced Learner’ Dictionary, Oxford University Press Avery, P & Susan, E (1992), Teaching American English pronunciation, Oxford University Press Baker, A & Goldstein, S (1990), Pronunciation Pair- an introduction course for students of English, Cambridge University Press Bowen, T & Mark, J (1992), The pronunciation book, Oxford University Press Celce-Murcia, M (1996), Teaching pronunciation, Cambridge University Press Dulay, Burt and Krashen (1982), Language two, Oxford University Press Ellis, R (1997), Second language acquisition, Oxford University Press Gillham (2000), Developing a questionnaire, Continuum International Publishing Group 10 Ha Cam Tam (2005), Common pronunciation problems of Vietnamese learners of English, VNU 11 H Collins (2003), Collins English Dictionary, Harper Collins Publishers 12 Jacobovists, L.A (1969), A psycholinguistic analysis of second language learning and bilingualism, Illinois 13 Jonathan Crowether (1992), Oxford Advanced Learner’s Encyclopedic, Oxford University Press 14 Katamba, F (1996), An introduction to phonology, Longman 15 Kelly, G (2002), How to teach pronunciation, Cambridge University Press 16 Laroy, A (1995), Pronunciation, Oxford University Press 17 Littlewood, W.T (1980), Foreign and second language learning, Cambridge Language Teaching Library 18 P Roach (2000), English phonetics and phonology, Cambridge University Press 19 Wallace, M.J (1998), Action research for language teachers, Cambridge University Press Researches: Idriss Hassan (2014), Pronunciation Problems: A Case Study of English Language Students at Sudan University of Science and Technology Abbas (2011), Why is Pronunciation So Difficult to Learn? Nguyen Thi Thu Phuong (2007), Difficulties for Vietnamese when pronouncing English – Final consonants Praistiana (2014), Difficulties faced by middle school students in English pronunciation Websites: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pronunciation https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pronunciation https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/vowel https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/consonant https://bvu.edu.vn/web/ffl/cong-trinh-bai-bao-khoahoc/-/asset_publisher/KIhbjhbiPqXD/content/some-common-pronunciation-problemsfacing-vietnam-learners-of-english-ths-nguyen-tien-dung6 https://blog.talk.edu/classes/english-pronunciation-errors-made-byvietnamese-speakers/ https://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/word-stress-rules.htm https://www.adrianunderhill.com/2015/05/07/how-to-make-the-english-vowela%CB%90/ https://lingbase.com/en/english/grammar/problematic-consonants 10 https://impact.chartered.college/article/mynott-does-teaching-consonantclusters-systematically-aid-decoding/ APPENDICES Survey Questionnaire The following survey questionnaire is designed based on my research topic on “Difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of second-year English major students at Thuongmai University” In order to carry out the research, I am looking forward to your cooperation All information provided by you is for research purposes and may not be used for any other purposes Thank you so much! Please answer the questions below Question 1: Where are you from ? Question 2: Which English skills you think is important in communication ? A Listening B Reading C Speaking D Writing Question 3: How often you speak English ? A Rarely (5%) B Occasionally (30%) C Sometimes (50%) D Often (70%) E Usually (90%) Question 4: Which factors you find difficult when speaking English? A Grammar B Pronunciation C Vocabulary D Others Question 5: How important pronunciation in speaking English you think ? A Very important B Important C Normal D Not important Question 6: When did you start learning English pronunciation ? A At Primary School B At Secondary School C At High School D At first year in college E Never Question 7: Have you ever taken part in any pronunciation courses ? A Yes B No Question 8: Which following vowel sounds are difficult for you to pronounce ? (Youcan choose more than 1) A /ɪ/ sound B /æ/ sound C /ɑ:/ sound D /ɔː/ sound E Others Question 9: What difficulties are you face when pronouncing English ? (You can choose more than 1) A I cannot pronounce some sounds that doesn’t exist in Vietnamese phonetic system (For example: /ð/, /θ/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /tʃ/, /dʒ) B I cannot pronounce some consonant clusters ( For example: /st/ sound in “fast”) C I regularly omit final consonant sounds or add other sounds instead D I have difficulty in correctly pronouncing words just by looking at the written form E I face word stress problems when pronouncing words with or more syllables F I have difficulty with my local language influences (For example: /l/ and /n/ sound) 10 Question 10: Which strategies you use to improve your English pronunciation ? A Listening to English song B Listening to English audio, podcast, news, etc C Attending a Pronunciation course D Watching Pronunciation Lesson in Youtube, Tiktok, etc E Reading Pronunciation books F Practicing “Tongue twister” G Recording yourself when speaking English Question 11: Which strategy you think will be most effective in improving English pronunciation ? A Listening from foreign sources (Listening to English song, audio, podcast, news, etc.) B Learning International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) ( Attending a Pronunciation course; watching Pronunciation Lesson in Youtube, Tiktok; reading Pronunciation books, etc.) C Practicing regularly ( Practicing “Tongue twister”; recording yourself when speaking English, etc.) 11 Passage from The Wisdom Post (Audio Recording) The words stress and anxiety have never been so commonly used in the past than in the last few years Stress and anxiety go hand in hand and are spreading into our lives like an epidemic One thing can lead to another and vice versa A prolonged exposure to stressful situations may soon change into an anxiety disorder And, if one already suffers from a clinical condition of anxiety, it will ultimately lead to more stress There is a very fine but clear difference between the two terms- stress and anxiety Stress is a way our mind and body respond to any difficult or unpleasant situation It is more dependent on external factors, like any financial problem, tension in the family, bad news, unsafe environment, long working hours, the difficult atmosphere at the workplace, poor health, or something like that Usually, the stress would go away as soon as the factor or reason behind it fades Anxiety is not just a response It is a condition and also a disorder, that develops after one has gone through severe painful events, deep tragedy or discomfort for a very long time What makes it even worse is that unlike stress, anxiety is not purely dependent on the cause or negative situation It has been observed that even when the painful cause or situation disappears, the anxiety may still persist and eventually cause further stress 12 ... entitled: ? ?Difficulties and strategies for improving English pronunciation of second-year English major students at Thuongmai University? ?? Hopefully, this study will help students understand deeply... some of the difficulties in improving their pronunciation that they presumably encounter, as well as appropriate strategies to master English pronunciation Especially, for secondyear students of. .. designed for main purposes The first one is to figure out the students? ?? attitude about English pronunciation and its importance Secondly, the information of students? ?? English pronunciation difficulties