A STUDY ON PRONUNCIATION OF SOME ENGLISH CONSONANTS BY VIETNAMESE LEARNERS

i Acknowledgement I am, first of all, particularly indebted to my supervisor, Ms Ha Cam Tam, of the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Vietnam National University, Hanoi for her valuable instructions, criticism, comments, correction and for her kindly encouragement during the development of this Study I also wish to express my gratitude to the two teachers and also my friends: Imogen from England and Tania from Russia for their assistance on the recordings and especially for their valuable comments and suggestions in the data collection procedures My appreciation and gratitude are also extended to my students studying at Haiphong Medical University for their enthusiastic help in recording and my colleagues there for their encouragement and support The last but not the least, I would like to convey my thanks to my family, all my friends and the one I love who encouraged me to take this task and to many others who have assisted All have enabled me to expand my area of expertise and to complete my study And I would take a full responsibility for this paper, and would appreciate all comments made on it Haiphong, September 2007, Dao Thi My Hanh ii Abstract This is a quasi- experimental research on the pronunciation of six English consonants/Τ ∆ Σ Ζ τΣ δΖ/ which are believed to impede Vietnamese learners much from speaking The study aimed at finding out Vietnamese learners’ problems in pronouncing the six sounds basing on their articulatory descriptions, in other words, articulatory phonetics and the causes of the problems The study was conducted by recording the participants’ pronunciation of some certain words and sentences using these word and observing the subjects’ real speech in class After that three different teachers listened to the recordings to note down the problematic sounds made by the subjects of the study in order to figure out their difficulties in articulating these sounds and the causes of these difficulties From the results, some pedagogical suggestions are offered to improve the English pronunciation of students at Haiphong Medical University iii Table of contents Acknowledgement i Abstract ii Table of contents iii List of tables v Part 1: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale Aims of the study Scope of the study Methods of the study Organization of the study .2 Part 2: DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 - Phonetics .3 1.2 Articulatory phonetics 1.3 Consonants 1.3.1 General descriptions of consonants .7 1.3.2 English consonants 1.3.2 Fricatives /Τ, ∆/ and / Ζ, Σ/ .8 Τ 1.3.2.2 Affricatives/τΣ, δΖ/ / 1.3.3 Vietnamese consonants 1.3.4 English vs Vietnamese 11 1.4 Review of previous research on pronunciation 12 Chapter 2: THE STUDY 14 2.1 Methodology 14 2.1.1 Research questions 14 2.1.2 Data collection instruments 14 2.1.3 Data collection procedures 16 2.1.4 Subjects of the study .17 2.2 Data results 17 2.2.1 Data collected from the recordings .17 iv 2.2.1.1 Mispronunciations across the examiners 18 2.2.1.2 Mispronunciations across subjects 19 2.2.1.3 Mispronunciations across the positions of sounds 20 2.2.1.4 Mispronunciations across the positions of individual sounds 21 2.2.1.5 Mispronunciations across the exercises 24 2.2.1.6 Mispronunciations by deviation types 27 2.2.1.7 Mispronunciations across omission 28 2.2.2- Data collected through class 29 2.3 Discussion 30 Part 3: CONCLUSION .33 Major findings 33 Implications 34 Conclusion 36 Suggestions for further study .36 References: 37 v Abbreviation HPMU: Haiphong Medical University ESP: English for Specific Purpose ESL: English as Second Language List of tables Table 1: Consonants in the English language Table 2: 21 Consonants in Northern Vietnamese dialect Table 3: 22 Consonants in Southern Vietnamese dialect Table 4: Mispronunciations across the examiners Table 5: Mispronunciations across subjects Table 6: Mispronunciations across the positions of sound Table 7: Mispronunciations across the positions of individual sounds Table 8: Mispronunciations across the exercises Table 9: Mispronunciations across deviation types Table 10: Mispronunciations across omission types Table 11: Mispronunciations classroom interaction Part 1: INTRODUCTION Rationale English, the most popular foreign language in Vietnam, has been taught from the early age (at the age of or even younger) in most of schools and universities throughout the country as a compulsory subject Thus, many Vietnamese, especially the young people, can speak English; however, not many of them "have intelligible English pronunciation so that they can be understood easily in direct communication with foreigners." It is the exact fact happening in Haiphong Medical University (HPMU) while it is widely believed that good communications skills are essential for pharmacy school graduates, an increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse group Wherever their career paths lead, they will be talking with others — patients, physicians and colleagues — about drugs An unintelligible word or a mispronunciation could lead to a dangerous error That leads the author to the thought of making a study on the pronunciation of English consonants that most Vietnamese learners meet difficulties in pronouncing correctly, so as to see how differently they pronounce from that the native speakers The results of the research can infer some suggestions basing on the reasons of this phenomenon to improve the students' pronunciation in general and of those sounds in particular Aims of the study This research aims at figuring out if the Vietnamese students under the study have difficulties in pronouncing English consonants and the causes of those difficulties The results will provide insights and assist ESL teachers as they strive to reduce or eliminate problems regarding pronunciation of those consonants as well as raising the awareness of learners during their learning process Therefore, the research focuses on problems that learners of HPMU encounter in pronouncing English consonants Scope of the study This study, basing on articulatory phonetics, presents several analyses on the pronunciations of the six consonant sounds/∆, Τ, Σ, Ζ, δΖ, τΣ/, which occur in some selected words and sentences used for recording, made by the ten non- English majored students learning in HPMU with a hypothesis that the learners in HPMU produce these sounds differently from the native speakers in terms of articulation After affirming the truth, some of the subjects' problems in pronouncing those sounds are pointed out with the reasons causing them and suggested solutions for such problems Methods of the study Since the study attempts to find out if the learners at HPMU have problems in pronouncing the six studied consonants and how different it is in the pronunciation of those sounds between the students at HPMU and native speakers, a combination of different data collection methods were used including recording the participants’ pronunciations of prepared scripts, observing their performance in class and note- taking Details of methodology applied in the study are discussed in part 2, chapter Organization of the study To achieve the aims of the study, this paper is divided into three main parts They are INTRODUCTION, DEVELOPMENT, and CONCLUSION INTRODUCTION includes the reasons of choosing the thesis, the aims, the scope, the methods and the organization of the study DEVELOPMENT, the most important part of the study, consists of two chapters Chapter is devoted to the presentation of the theoretical background relevant to the research Firstly, some basic concepts of phonetics, articulatory phonetics and consonants are introduced Then the general review of English teaching in HPMU is described Chapter includes methodology applied in the study in which the questions of the research are raised, then the data instruments and the procedures and methodology used for data collection along with detailed descriptions of the participants are presented In this chapter, the results obtained are then analysed to find out the differences in the pronunciation between the native and the subjects' CONCLUSION contains a summary of the major findings under investigation given along with the concluding remarks established in the study and some suggestions for further study as well as some possible suggestions basing on the origin of the problems to English language teaching as regards pronunciation in general and of the consonants in particular to elementary students at HPMU Part 2: DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1: LITERATURE REVIEW In this chapter, the first section provides some basic linguistical and phonetical concepts to bring a common view of the matter studied Then an overview on consonant system in English and Vietnamese is presented in order to give a proof that English has six consonants that are blur and even not exist in the Vietnamese language Finally, a general review of English teaching generally and English pronunciation teaching in particular at HPMU is offered to see what happened to students' competence of English 1.1 - Phonetics This section starts with a distinction between the two related terms (often loosely) used to refer to linguistic disciplines studying the linguistic sign which de Saussure called the acoustic image: phonetics and phonology While phonetics deals with how speech sounds are actually produced, transmitted and received in actual spoken language, phonology deals specifically with the ways those sounds are organized into the individual languages, hence dealing with abstractions on a virtual basis Here see two useful definitions for phonetics and phonology: "Phonology deals with the speakers' knowledge of the sound system of a language It is therefore exclusively concerned with langue or competence [ ] Phonology can be divided into two branches: (1) segmental phonology and (2) suprasegmental phonology" (Skandera & Burleigh, 2005:5) "Phonetics first of all divides, or segments, concrete utterances into individual speech sounds It is therefore exclusively concerned with parole or performance Phonetics can then be divided into three distinct phases: (1) articulatory phonetics, (2) acoustic phonetics, and (3) auditory phonetics" (Skandera & Burleigh, 2005:3) Phonetics will be almost unanimously acknowledged to be the linguistic science, which studies speech sounds: the way in which they are produced (uttered, articulated), the way in which they are perceived, their physical characteristics, etc Therefore, it is these more “palpable”, measurable aspects of the phonic aspects of language that constitute the domain of phonetics (Katamba, 1996) Phonetics is concerned with various aspects relevant for the physical characteristics of sounds Several branches of phonetics can further be distinguished, depending on the narrower domain of interest of the respective field Thus, one of the most important branches of phonetics is articulatory phonetics which studies the way in which human beings articulate or utter the sounds they make use of in verbal communication Another branch of phonetics that studies the physical parameters of speech sounds is called acoustic phonetics It is the most “technical” of all disciplines that are concerned with the study of verbal communication And the last branch is auditory phonetics which studies the way people perceive speech sounds However, the research takes the Vietnamese learners' problems of pronouncing six English consonants into considerations regarding to the way they use their organs of articulations pronouncing such sounds This is also what articulatory phonetics study and the theoretical background of it is presented with more details in the following section 1.2 Articulatory phonetics Articulatory phonetics, one of the three main branches of phonetics, is the study of the organs of speech and their use in producing speech sounds The term 'organs of speech' refers to those parts of the human body that are concerned in various ways with the production of speech A lot of them are only secondarily concerned with the production of speech – their primary functions have to with eating, chewing, and swallowing food, and respiration Those parts of the body below (not the lungs) belong to the vocal tract The vocal tract is divided into the supraglottal and the subglottal tract (as shown in Picture 1) • lips • larynx • teeth • vocal folds/cords • nasal cavity • trachea • tongue • lungs • hard palate • uvula • soft palate • diaphragm • pharynx • jaw bone Pic 1: Articulators Articulatory phonetics deals with the major aspects of speech production They are the air stream mechanism, the state of vocal cords, the state of velum, the place and the manner of articulation (Davenport & Hannahs, 1998) On the other hand, this study is paid attention to consonants, particularly the six studied ones, therefore, the manner and the place of articulation and voicing, the three main features of consonants, are discussed with more interest, as followed Clark and Yallop use two features to describe the manner of articulation of consonants: constriction and articulation The degree of constriction decreases from total closure via partial constriction to a fully open vowel like manner Articulation divides into dynamic and stable Altogether, there are seven recognized manners of articulation: stop, fricative, approximant, nasal, flap, tap and trill The manners of articulation are described as followed: Manner Stop Fricative Description a complete closure at any point in the vocal tract and sudden release of the closure potentially stable articulation produced by a constriction in the vocal tract that is narrow enough to create a turbulent airflow potentially stable articulation in which the constriction is normally Approximant greater than in a vowel but not great enough to produce turbulence at the point of constriction 25 & a10); in contrast, 40% made those sounds better in words than in sentences Only a7's mispronunciation stays the same in both exercises (33.33%) The last consonant /τΣ/ has 40% of the subjects pronouncing correctly; 60% pronounced better in words than in sentences, in which 30% of that did not mispronounce a single word, but 33.33% did in sentences In brief, the data presented so far show that when the subjects read the words or the sentences consisting of those consonants, all of the subjects seemed to fail to produce the sounds appropriately enough to make their speech comprehensible to native speakers.For instance, they pronounced with as /wiz/ or /wid/, she as /si:/, especially the word social got marked "very confused" by the native speaker 26 Table 8: Mispronunciation by each subject across the exercises 27 2.2.1.6 Mispronunciations across deviation types From the data collected, the researcher found some popular deviations of the six consonants made by the subjects And the following table presents what was taken from the native teacher's notes because it is believed that the native speaker has "the best ears" to foreign pronunciation or accent Consonants' sound confusion Subjects with deviations (/10) /τ°Η/ /Σ/ Σ /∆/ ∆ /τΣ/ τ (a1, a2, a4, a5, a9, a10) /z/ (a4, a5, a7, a9) /s/ (a1, a2, a3, a6, a8, a9, a10) /z/ (a1, a2, a6, a10) /τΣ/ (a5) /s/ (a1, a2, a4, a5, a6, a7, a8, a9, a10) (a8) /d/ (a2, a4, a5, a6, a7, a9) /z/ /δΖ/ δ (a5) /τ°Η/ /Ζ/ Ζ /d/ /t/ /Τ/ Τ (a6, a7, a8) (a7, a9, a10) /c/ (a2, a6, a7, a10) /Σ/ (a8, a9, a10) Table 9- Mispronunciations by deviation types The deviations of each consonant shown above in the second column are only some of many different confusing sounds that can be written in words by the English teacher The third column shows the subjects that made certain deviations from the original sound on the total of 10 Some of the subjects made such a confusing sound that the native teacher claimed "very unclear- very difficult to understand" or "very confused", for instance, a9 got that mark when he tried to pronounce the words and the sentence consisting /Ζ/ like television and usually It can be seen in table that some of the subjects' pronunciations changed differently depending where the sound stands: initial, medial or final, in other words, at the 28 same time they produced a certain consonant in two different ways, for example, a7 and a9 both made /∆/ become /d/ or /z/ Another example is the case of a10, he pronounced /τΣ/ as /c/ and /Σ/ at the same time in the final position (table 7) 2.2.1.7 Mispronunciations across omission It is necessary to point out in details the problem of sound omission because it is considered to be one of the most common pronunciation problems of Vietnamese learners The data showed that the students participating in the study also 'forgot' to pronounce the sounds especially in the final position, besides mispronounced them there as well The data of sound omission in the below table are taken from the notes of the English teacher as the standard /Τ/ Τ /Ζ/ Ζ /δΖ/ δ /Σ/ Σ /∆/ ∆ /τΣ/ τ (2) (1) (3) (1) (2) (3) a1 0 0 a2 0 0 a3 0 0 a4 0 0 0 a5 0 0 a6 0 0 a7 1 a8 0 0 a9 0 0 a10 0 1 Table 10- Mispronunciations across omission The number under the consonant is the total time of its occurrence in the final position in the two exercises It is not surprising to find out from the result above that 90% of the subjects at least once 'forgot ' to pronounce the final sound (a1, a3, a6, a8, a9) Particularly, the case of a7, he seemed to completely ignore most of the final sounds (except /Τ/ and I still remained the wonder why so) while a4 did pronounce all of them 29 2.2.2- Data collected through class The data collected from observation during the teaching time of the researcher, which are offered in table 11, provide more persuasive proof to draw a conclusion besides that taken from the recordings in the lab It is because when recording, the subjects may be affected by some psychological factors like tense, anxiety, etc, which might be less when they are let free to speak in class And the following is what the author observed: Types of mistakes No of subjects with mistakes /Τ/ /∆/ /Σ/ 10 /τΣ/ /δΖ/ 10 /Τ/ = /d/, /t/, / τ°Η/ 10 /∆/ = /d/, /z/, / τ°Η/ /Σ/ = /s/ /Ζ/ = /z/, /s/ 10 /τΣ/ = /c/ ('ch') /δΖ/ = /z/, /τΣ/ Sound confusion 10 /Ζ/ Sound omission 10 Table 11- Mispronunciation in classroom interations Though the omission of the dental consonant /Τ/ was not found in the notes of the Τ native teacher, from what the researcher observed it can be affirmed that 100% of the subjects did not pronounce the dental consonant when they spoke in class Relating to the post- alveolar fricative /Ζ/ and /Σ/, while only one subjects was found to omit these sounds when recording, all of them, found in the class dialogues, ignored /Ζ/ and nine of them did the same with /Σ/ in final position Similarly, the post- alveolar affricative /δΖ/ also got 100% in real speech meanwhile as it is shown in table 10 that 70% of the subjects found in the recordings did not pronounce it 30 About the sound confusion, there is little difference between the data taken from the recordings and that from the class performance It can be inferred that whether the subjects are aware or not when speaking, many of them cannot produce those sounds correctly 2.3 Discussion The results of this study showed that all the subjects of the study had problems in pronouncing the six studied sounds/∆, Τ, Σ, Ζ, δΖ, τΣ/, in which the most common problems were sound deviation and sound omission Relating to sound deviation, /Τ/ was mispronounced the most (72.5%) and its deviations are like / τ°Η/ in Vietnamese sound system (as in th nh th i) especially when it precedes and like /τ/ or /d/ when it stands at the final position The reasons for this problem are because firstly, the consonant does not exist in the Vietnamese language thus it is difficult for the students to learn its articulation with the tip of the tongue touching behind the top, front teeth and blowing the air through two sides of the tongue without making voice, especially when the sound stands in words and the words are in sentence Secondly, the way it looks in letters the same as it does in Vietnamese, i.e 'th', also made the students automatically pronounce it as the way it is in their native language Finally, as the native teacher noted, it is because the subjects 'were trying so hard', perhaps with the hope of avoiding mispronouncing it Although the percentage of /δΖ/ mispronunciation is less than /Τ/ (Table 4), it is the one that 100% of the subjects had problems when pronouncing it (Table 5) Absolutely, the Vietnamese sound system also does not have this affricative, even the consonant 'gi' as in gió // (especially in Saigon variety), which is supposed to be pronounced harder and stronger than 'd' in (con) dao /z/, is not considered to be the same as /δΖ/ Vietnamese "gi" is like English "z" in Hanoi (the North) and like English "y" in Saigon (the South) Consequently, Vietnamese learners usually get confused when pronouncing this sound and often make it like // or even /z/ The participants’ mispronunciations were related to the positions of the sounds in words It can be indicated from Table that the final position of the sound is the weakest point of all the students when they speak The students’ problems in the final position are they either omitted one of the six when the sound is in the final position, or pronounced it 31 incorrectly, for example, the words with /ωΙ∆/ turning to /ωΙd/, change /τΣεΙνδΖ/ to /τΣεΙντΣ/ The data of the study shows this problem was found not only in six chosen consonants but also in the other ones like the final sound /k/ in like, /s/ in juice, /z/ in Japanese It is obvious that the cause of this mispronunciation is because of the mother tongue's influence Since in Vietnamese the ending sounds are never pronounced, additionally, the language has no ending sound for every word, so it is understandable when the subjects not get used to pronouncing the final sound though many of them have an awareness of the importance in distinguishing words of final endings like in the pair nice- night There are two tendencies (shown clearly in table 9) of the sound deviation, which the subjects produced the six sounds The first one is that they tend to make the fricative and affricative sounds softer because they may find it much familiar to their ears and much easier to use their organs of speech production The most outstanding sound of the case is /Ζ/ when all the subjects were found to make it like /s/ or /z/ In her article of the common errors in pronunciation by Vietnamese learners, Ha Cam Tam (2005), gave an example related to the post- alveolar sound /Ζ/, "considering the manner of articulation of /Ζ/: the air stream escapes through the narrow groove in the center of the tongue and causes friction between the tongue and the alveolar ridge." She wrote "This is normally difficult for Vietnamese learners because we not have the same sound in our language, especially when this sound occurs at the final position of a word, the act of holding the tongue against the alveolar ridge for the air to pass through with some friction is a completely new concept for many learners." The same thing happens to the fricative /Σ/ when nine out of ten subjects made it softer like /s/ though the fricative sound /Σ/ also appears in Saigon variety described as /♣/ (table 3) It is because all the subjects are from the North, that means they speak Northern variety and are not used to this consonant, as a consequence, they can only made the sound softer like the way they in their own dialect The second tendency is the subjects made these six sounds harder, typically the fricative /Τ/ which was produced like /t/ or /τ°Η/, and /∆/ like /d/ by more than half of the subjects Besides the reasons discussed above, it is probably because the way /Τ/ and /∆/ 32 look in letters is the same as Vietnamese sound /τ°Η/, thus, the subjects got confused while trying hard to pronounce them at the same time There is a fact that the confusing sounds listed in table are what the native speaker could describe in letters, because indeed the subjects made some such strange sounds that she complained 'very unclear' or 'very confused' And one more thing here is that some subjects made a consonant one certain confusing sound but some also pronounced the same consonant in two different ways depending either on that consonant is in isolation or in a sentence or on the position of the consonant in a word (initial, medial, final) For example, a subject pronounced /Ζ/ as /z/ in final position and as /s/ in medial or another made /Τ/ as /d/ and /t/ at the same time Concerning sound omission, /δΖ/ was most omitted usually in the final position by most of the subjects (Tale 10) It is because either this is a strange sound for its nonexistence in Vietnamese so the students could not make it or the students not have the habit in pronouncing ending sound due to their naive language’s interaction It is interesting to find out that though the students had preparation and managed to pronounce those sounds correctly consciously, sooner or later they still were found 'pretending' by what they spoke automatically in class And another interesting thing is some of the students could pronounce single words correctly, but failed to it when those words are in sentences and vice versa In short, most of the subjects of the study had difficulties in pronouncing the six consonants to different extent, in which the frequency of mispronouncing /Τ/ is the highest, this indicates that it is the most difficult sound to articulate and /δΖ/ seems to be the most confusing sound because all the subjects mispronounced it though the frequency of mispronunciation is less than /Τ/ Moreover, all the subjects found pronouncing ending sounds the most challenging to overcome Yet, it must be admitted that there is no guarantee that the data taken also included mistakes of pronunciation induced by psychological factors such as anxiety, nervousness, etc There is only one female subject who is considered the best of the ten because she got the 'good' mark from the three teachers in almost every words and sentences However, the native teacher noted that "maybe because she speaks slowly, she is being very careful to pronounce correctly with all these." Of course, this girl cannot be that perfect, as though 33 she almost made no mistakes, she is not the exception with the mistake of final omission and got a bad note from the native teacher with the noun phrase "orange juice" in the first sentence " end of orange is not pronounced sounds like oran juice " Or in another case of a male student, he got a comment from the native speaker "maybe he tried so hard to pronounce correctly", and he made some sounds harder than usual as well as "unnatural pauses" in sentences About the data taken by observation the subjects' performance in class, on one hand, it cannot be something absolutely true because the observer (the researcher) does not have as good ears as the native speaker does to recognize a hundred percent exact mistakes made by her students Furthermore, sometimes the researcher probably let in her background knowledge of the subjects' language competence that made her automatically understand what her students were talking about even when they spoke unclearly and incorrectly On the other hand, those data can partially be the evidence for fortifying the results taken from the students' recordings, which helps the researcher come to an implication and a conclusion of the study Part 3: CONCLUSION Major findings This study was set up with three questions and now they were all answered in the following order Do the subjects of the study have problems in pronouncing /Τ, ∆, Ζ, Σ,δΖ, τΣ/? From all the results presented above and some discussion so far it can be affirmed that all of the subjects of the study, whose English competence is at elementary level, have 34 big problems in pronouncing the six studied consonants The subjects' main problems relating to the six studied consonants are either they mispronounced the sounds or omitted them, especially when the sounds are in the final position How they differ from native speakers in articulating these sounds? The way the subjects of the study produced these sounds differently from the native speakers by either making the sounds softer or making them harder All of the subjects have difficulties in producing the sound /δΖ/, particularly when it is in the final position; and many of them pronounced /Τ/ the worst in every position, especially in the initial (Table 7) Besides, all the subjects failed to work out the sounds when they are in the final position, including omitting and mispronouncing them What are the causes of the mispronunciations? There are many reasons for all the students' pronunciation problems, including both objective and subjective ones The former is because of the influence of the students' native language, i.e the way of controlling the articulators when producing these sounds is difficult, complicated and strange to Vietnamese native speakers under the condition that there are not many opportunities at school for them to practice speaking The latter is that the students are lazy to try harder to pronounce the sounds correctly by the way they impose their Vietnamese pronunciation on English words that look like Vietnamese spelling, for example, words with 'th' in spelling Implications Research has proved that pronunciation is one of the most important factors to comprehensible communication, or else, the communication can easily break down That is why teaching English pronunciation has been paid more and more attention to in English classes around Vietnam However, it can be deduced from the results of the study that the students in HPMU have big problems in pronunciation, especially in pronouncing the six studied consonants It is even worse in real when observing their performance in class There are many things to blame for, but they should be studied more in research of methodology It is necessary to offer some suggestions for solving the problems The thing is that the teachers in HPMU should be more aware of the importance of pronunciation in 35 practice so that they would spend more time teaching students to pronounce accurately right from the start so as to help the future doctors speak more intelligible English It is a good idea to pay attention to teaching pronunciation for one or two weeks right from the beginning of the first year of university to bring the students a chance to learn and have more time practicing pronunciation of English phonemes appropriately This can also help to avoid mispronunciation fossilization The course book- Headway Elementary, designed with some pronunciation exercises, which is taught in the first year of university, is also a good suggestion in helping improve the students’ pronunciation if the teachers can exploit it most Besides, it is essential to teach single units of English phonemes at the same time as teaching the students how to pronounce them and practise them in connected speech along with some other aspects such as pitch, intonation About the mispronunciation in consonants generally and the six chosen ones particularly, teachers take the most important part in ameliorating the students' pronunciation Since "correction plays an important role in the development of students' ability to speak and write accurately" (Truscott, 1999) it is teachers' task to correct any mispronunciation from the very first so that the mistake cannot be fossilized However, "prevention is always better than treatment" Teachers should provide the students detailed descriptions of six consonants and careful instructions, so -called 'learner- friendly explanation' (Kelly, 2000) of how to control articulators to produce those sounds After the effort of instructing and explaining the formation of those sounds, the teachers can design some simple pronunciation exercises for students to practise in class For instance, let students listen to words that are made up with the same vowels and number of syllables but different consonants to recognize the consonant sounds, then ask them to repeat after the tape Another example found in English File is designed as a matching exercise with certain pictures of consonants or any phonemes and some groups of words Then students have to decide which picture goes with which group of words by reading out loud by themselves That way helps students get the perception of the sounds they make under the teacher's instructions In short, despite the fact that Vietnamese learners meet many challenges in the process of learning English due to the differences in the two languages, there are still ways to 36 improve their language competence, in which none is better than practice since 'practice makes perfect' Conclusion Learning a language is an ongoing, long-term process and learners may meet lots of challenges when they learn how to pronounce what is not available in their language Because "learning a language means learning a new way of using the speech organs" as Ha Cam Tam wrote in her paper "Common pronunciation problems of Vietnamese learners' (2005) " this process can be more difficult as some of the speech organs are not visible and their movements are far back in the pharyngeal cavity thus difficult to control." Pronouncing English consonants accurately is not only the problem of Vietnamese learners in general but also of the students in HPMU in particular The worst problems are omitting the final sounds and mispronouncing consonants, not to mention the other aspects of pronunciation such as pitch, intonation, etc There is a fact that not many learners studying in HPMU can speak intelligible English; due to the way they pronounce English sounds and their improper intonation and pitch, their thoughts and feelings can be hardly expressed and understood appropriately in the communication with native speakers Hence, it is suggested that the teaching method and the learning strategies should be paid more attention to Suggestions for further study After completing this study, I discovered some limitations remained Firstly, the scripts for recording did not have enough examples of words and sentences to cover every position of the studied sounds and the combination of these sounds with other sounds are not typical enough to find out various problems such as consonant cluster, linkage of sounds, word stress and so on Moreover, during the data analysis, I found that all the subjects had problems in their pronunciation not only of the six chosen consonants but also of the clusters, of the vowels not to mention the pitch, intonation and the aspects of connected speech However, due to the scope of the study, the other problems would be taken consideration in another study 37 The research on the pronunciation of the six consonants that has been discussed so far is only one out of the great deal of aspects of English And due to limited knowledge and the time of the study, it cannot be as sufficient and elaborate as it is expected For example, the number of the subjects is not enough to represent for the whole students at HPMU In addition, the gender of the subjects took no part in the data analysis, thus the study did no go further inside the subjects' problems to see whether their problems vary between males and females Therefore, the author wishes to study more about Vietnamese learners' pronunciation problems relating to another English sounds, clusters, stress, intonation, etc on the same subjects or more with the hope of helping her students improve their English so that they can use it for further study abroad and possess international medical achievements References: Books Ashby, M & Maidment, J (2005)- Introducing Phonetic Science CUP, pp 34-41 (up to the first §) and pp 52-62 Cruttenden A (2001)- Gimson's Pronunciation of English, 6th Edition- Arnold, London 38 Davenport M & Hannahs S.J (1998)- Introducing Phonetics & Phonology- Arnold, Great Britain Ha Cam Tam (2005)- Common pronunciation problems of Vietnamese learners of English, Journal of Science, T XXI, No1- VNU Jenkins J.(2000)- The phonology of English as an International Language: New Models, New Norms, New Goals- Oxford University Press, Hongkong Katamba F (1996)- An Introduction to Phonology- Longman, Malaysia Kelly G (2000)- How to Teach Pronunciation- Longman Malaysia Kenworthy, J (1992)- Teaching English Pronunciation- Longman London and New York Oxenden C & Seligson P (2003)- English File Oxford University Press 10 Pennington M C (1996)- Phonology in English Language Teaching: An International Approach- Longman London and New York 11 Richards J.C., Platt J., Platt H (1997)- Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics- Longman 12 Roach, P (1983)- English Phonetics and Phonology: Chapter on "The production of speech sounds" (pp 8-16), 13 Roach, P (2001)- Phonetics: Chapters and on "Making speech sounds" and "Classifying speech sounds" (pp 11-24) 14 Skandera, P & Burleigh, P (2005)- A Manual of English Phonetics and Phonology Narr, (pp 12-14; 19-26) Internet 15 Wikipedia (2007)- English consonants Manner of articulation Retrieved August 22, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manner_of_articulation 16 Wikipedia (2007)- Vietnamese phonology Retrieved September 10, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_phonology 39 17 Wikipedia (2007)- Vietnamese language Retrieved September 10, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_language 18 Wikipedia (2007)- Vietnamese language Retrieved September 10, 2007, from http://www.algebra.com/~pavlovd/wiki/Vietnamese_language 19 Wikipedia (2007)- Vietnamese alphebet Retrieved September 10, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet 20 James Kirby (2005)- A Brief Phonetic Description of Northern Vietnamese University of Chicago Department of Linguistics 21 Truscott, J (1999), What’s wrong with grammar correction, retrieved August 10, 2006, from http://www.utpjournals.com/product/cmlr/554/554-Truscott.html 22 English Consonants Retrieved September 15, 2007, from www.seacrc.org/media/pdfiles/cnseng.pdf 23 Articulatory Phonetics Retrieved September 15, 2007, from http://www.uni- bielefeld.de/lili/personen/vraithel/teaching/HTHS/articulatory.html 24 Place of articulation Retrieved September 15, 2007 September 15, 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_of_articulation 25 Place of articulation Retrieved http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/linguistics/russell/138/sec3/poa-big.htm ... (a1 , a2 , a6 , a1 0) /τΣ/ (a5 ) /s/ (a1 , a2 , a4 , a5 , a6 , a7 , a8 , a9 , a1 0) (a8 ) /d/ (a2 , a4 , a5 , a6 , a7 , a9 ) /z/ /δΖ/ δ (a5 ) /τ°Η/ /Ζ/ Ζ /d/ /t/ /Τ/ Τ (a6 , a7 , a8 ) (a7 , a9 , a1 0) /c/ (a2 , a6 , a7 , a1 0)... ESL: English as Second Language List of tables Table 1: Consonants in the English language Table 2: 21 Consonants in Northern Vietnamese dialect Table 3: 22 Consonants in Southern Vietnamese dialect... 1.3 Consonants 1.3.1 General descriptions of consonants From a phonetic point of view, consonants are articulated in one of two ways: either there is a closing movement of one of the vocal organs,