AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE PRONUNCIATION ERRORS IN ENGLISH EXPERIENCED BY THE LAOTIAN STUDENTS AT

1 Chapter One INTRODUCTION 1 RATIONALE One of the most important purposes of foreign learners of English is to pronounce English sounds correctly and persuasively as well as speak English well for the sake of comprehensive communication We all try as much as possible to reach a nearly native like pronunciation so as to be easily understood and make others get at what we are saying That means while our lexis has reached proficiency level, our speaking, which is often without the correct pronunciation of English sounds, still falls short of our own expectations Comprehension problem is likely to result and communication could never been successful This makes the mastery of English pronunciation more and more important than ever and draws much teachers’ and students’ attention on the subject as though it is quite a boring, tough, and less interesting subject in comparison with other ones For students of English at National University of Laos, good English pronunciation is of greater importance as most of them will later be models of English teacher for their own future students as long as pedagogical matters have been concerned However, from my own experience and observation, students of English at National University of Laos have experienced big problems with their English pronunciation, such as vowels, consonants, stress, intonation, and linking… These problems undoubtedly impair the process of students’ developing speaking skills, especially their pronunciation, their communicative competence and also, these shortcomings in pronunciation will inevitably have negative effects on their future students’ language acquisition and performance With this knowledge in mind, we boldly conduct an investigation into the problems or difficulties that Laotian students may experience in pronouncing English sounds We also try to make the problem come to light with its causes and set forward some helpful teaching activities with a view to helping these students overcome their problems AIMS, OBJECTIVES AND QUESTIONS OF THE STUDY 1.2.1 Aim This study aims at helping Laotian students improve their pronunciation, especially their performance of English consonants by suggesting some effective teaching activities for teachers to apply in classroom environment 1.2.2 Objectives The study is intended to fulfil the following objectives: To make a preliminary contrastive analysis between English and Lao consonant system in terms of phonetic features in the two languages; To detect and identify the common pronunciation errors and problems that Laotian students may experience in pronouncing English; To suggest effective solutions for the speech improvement of Laotian students in English 1.2.3 Questions of the study In this research paper, we focus on the following questions: What are the potential pronunciation errors that Laotian students may experience when they speak English? What are the causes of the problem? How can Laotian students overcome these possible errors in the pronunciation of English? 1.3 SCOPE OF THE STUDY Due to the constraint of time, our study is restricted to common pronunciation errors that Laotian students at the English Department at the National University of Laos may have in pronouncing English consonant sounds and sound clusters 1.4 ORGANIZATION OF STUDY Our study will be presented in five chapters as follows Chapter one, “Introduction”, includes the rationale, the justification for the study, the aims and objectives, research questions and the scope of the study Chapter Two, “Literature Review”, is an introduction about the previous studies on vowels, consonants, syllables The theoretical knowledge will consist of a brief review on consonant system of English and Laos in view of articulatory phonetics This chapter also discusses the difference between the phonetic realization of the consonant in the onset and coda of the syllable structure in English and Laos Chapter Three, “Research Design and Methodology”, presents the hypotheses as well as research method, and procedure of data collection and analysis Chapter Four, “Results and Discussion”, is written to describe the results drawn from the data collected to define what the common errors and problems in pronunciation that Laotian students may experience are Besides, in this chapter the reasons for all the problems will be presented and discussed in detail Chapter Five, “Conclusion and Implications”, draws some conclusions and the implications related to the study Finally, the study puts forwards some limitations and unsolved problems Chapter Two LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 PRIOR RESEARCH Historically speaking, Dr Xayavong (2005) explained that the currently used Lao language nowadays is derived from the Tai language family, which was originated in the Altai Mountain Range in the ancient Mongolia over a thousand years ago [8, p.39] During the period of 1960s, members of the Lao Committee embodied for the purpose of surveying and researching associated with the Lao language This committee had compiled the first Lao-Lao dictionary of Viravong in 1961 and the Lao grammar books (Part I (1963) and Part II (1970)) of the Lao Morphology [cited in 2, p.9-12] In parallel with using the Lao language as a medium of instructions in schools, colleges and other higher educational institutes in both public and private sectors in the Lao PDR at the present time, the Government has opened up their policies in cooperation with international communities As a matter of fact, the demands on using foreign languages; namely, French, English, German, Russian, etc., for communication and cooperation with foreign countries have increasingly been required in the Lao PDR; especially, in the National University of Laos Currently, many foreign languages; especially, the English language is mainly used in various fields of professions locally and internationally In this respect, Faculty of Letters under the direct domination of the National University of Laos; especially, Department of English has been assigned to use the English language into a variety of teaching and learning tasks In other words, syllabi within Department of English have been divided into different academic subjects and programmes; namely, BA Programme, Special Programmes, School of Foundation Studies Course, English for other Faculties, and the MA Programme (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) As it is known, the great majority of the Lao BA Programme students frequently claimed that English is recognised as the second foreign language for most Lao students Consequently, the vast majority of the Lao learners of English have mainly confronted with problems in their learning processes and the use within their real-life situation Some of the most significant problems frequently addressed by the great many teachers and students are commonly concerned with pronunciation in comparison with the English consonant sound systems To exemplify, Dr Muenmany (2002) argued that most Lao people have faced problems in pronouncing some European consonant phonemes; namely, /p/, /f/, /r/, /d/, /l/, /T/ and /D/, among others [3, p.1-3] Consequently, the above-mentioned difficulties in pronouncing English consonant phonemes will be linguistically identified into the diagnostically contrastive analysis of English and Lao consonant sound systems as shown in section 2.2 2.2 THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ENGLISH AND LAO PHONETIC SYSTEMS The rule of English phonetic system is totally different from that of Laos English phonetic system is characterized in word stress, sentence stress, rising and falling intonations, and sounds articulated at the end of the words; particularly, the final English consonants As it is known, the Lao phonetic system is based on the pitch of the sequence tones Normally, there are no specific emphasis on the utterances; namely, (1) word stresses and (2) the scarcity of the utterance of the final consonant sounds, such as the pronunciation of the ‘s’ /s/ occurring in the final position of any words in the Lao language According to the Lao Grammar Book of Vongvichit (1967), there are six tones; namely, mai ek ( '), mai to ( É ), mai dti ( ÊÊ ) and mai chattawa ( Ë ) [cited in 4, p.19] In this respect, the aforementioned Lao Tone Mark aspect is well supported by the Lao Tone Pitch Chart written by Hoshino and Marcus (1981), which classified that there are six tones, consisting of three consonant groups [1, p.158-161] The chart also shows the code combination of an initial consonant (i.e., types (kang, tam, sung)) and a final consonant (3 types (stops, nasals and others)), which describes the code for tone determination when pronouncing the words [1, p.158-161] 2.2.1 Consonant system in English and Laos However, according to our observation, it is not tone that causes problems for Lao students of English The problem is based on the difference in the system of consonants in the two languages To start the comparison between English consonants and Lao consonants, we would like to sketch a picture about the consonant chart in each language Table 2.1 English consonant chart Place LabioBilabial Dental Alveolar Manner dental p t Stops vd b d vless Affricates vd vless T f s Fricatives vd D v z vless m n Nasals l Lateral W r Approximants Palatoalveolar Palatal Velar Glottal k g tS dZ S Z ? h N j (w) Lao Consonant Phonemes Phonologically speaking, 20 Lao consonant phonemes may be classified as follows: – stops ([ph], [th], [kh], [p], [k], [b], [t], [d]), – fricatives (/f/, /s/, /c/, /h/), – nasals (/m/, /n /, /∆/, /N/), – liquids (/l/, /r/), and – semivowels (/w/, /j/) The Lao Consonant System Table 2.2 The Lao Consonant Chart Manner of articulation Voiceless aspirated stops Voiceless unaspirated stops Voiceless stops Fricative Nasals Liquids Semi vowels Place of articulation Bilabial Labio Dentals Dentals Palatal Velar ph th kh p t K b d s n l f m w c ∆ r j Glottal h N (Extracted from “The Linguistic Theory” (630LI221) for the SFS – NUOL by Senemany (2001) [4, p.51]) From the consonant charts of English and Lao, it is noted that English voiced labio-dental [v] is absent in Lao consonant system whereas the aspirated members of [p, t, k] are present in Lao with phonemic status Also, apart from this, Lao has these consonants as the phonemes in its system - the palatal fricative [c], palatal nasal [⎟] The relation between spelling and pronunciation is also a problem to take into consideration First, the letter "a" is pronounced “ah” as in “father”, so the word for “village”, ban, is pronounced “bahn” Secondly, words with “o” like “hot” are pronounced “hote” Lot ("vehicle") is “lote”, and “mot” ("used up") is “mote” Next, "ph" isn’t “f” but “p” as in English, and finally "th" is pronounced “t”, not as “th” in English The single letters "t" and "p" are used to represent hard consonant sounds that aren’t common in English 10 As for the consonants of Lao, the following have the same pronunciation as in English: [b, d, f, h, k, l, m, n, s ] The following letters have different sounds from English Two of them may be difficult for English speakers These are the hard /p/ sound and the hard /t/ sound The first is a cross between "p" and "b" while the second is a cross between "t" and "d" (like the "t" in "sixty") Table 2.3 Spelling-Pronunciation relationship in Laos vs English P a hard p/b sound Ph pronounced as "p" in English T a hard t/d sound Th pronounced as "t" in English G Has a harder sound, a cross between "g" and "k" J Has a harder sound than in English Ng used at the beginning as well as at the end of words W sometimes has a "v" sound Moreover, there are various pronouncing styles of the regional dialects from each part of the Lao country as shown below In the Vientiane dialect, [c] (like [c] as in “chin” in Vietnamese) and [k] are sometimes in free variation This occurs only in informal speech For example: k-c c-k = /kin/ vs /cin/ ( eat) = /cia / vs /kia/ ( paper) The phoneme /f/ is substituted for the phoneme /p/ in the Savannakhet dialect For example: 57 Native speaker’s performance [wOt h&p@nd t@ jO: Íi:n] Student’s performance [wOt h&p@nd tu: jO: si:n] Figure 4.7 The demonstration of the sentence “What happened to your chin?” made by the native English speaker as compared with that of Laotian student [wi: a: g@UiN t@ D@ su:] Figure 4.8 The demonstration of the sentence “We are going to the zoo” [wi: a: g@UiN t@ D@ zu:] made by the native English speaker as compared with that of Laotian student 58 The more they tried to keep the flow of sounds smoothly, the more stressful and nervous they were, and when they found themselves in such a pressure, they tried in vain to what they aimed at More often than not, they stumbled over their speech Actually, Kenworthy (1993) also states that such pressures of speaking leave little mental energy for paying attention to how the sounds come out [20, p.118] Hence, it took them a lot more judging time to speak out the words as they may have too much in their head to recollect in time Most of the time students slowed down their speech for careful pronunciation, which they thought would be safer at last That tells why there were many times during the testing, students’ fluency was suddenly stuck whenever they brainstormed to determine to appropriate sounds to pronounce It was clear that fluency is an elusive goal for most of the students in this part Different from the goal drawn in previous parts of testing students’ production English sounds and sound clusters in isolated words, this section hopes to witness their performance of the sounds in question in connected speech By putting the words into short sentences, the task seemed not difficult for the students to fulfil at all However, either might the students not know any aspects of the connected speech or the managing of the right pronunciation to make take them much time and effort that they failed to blend words within a single thought group smoothly or put the sounds phonologically connected They, consequently, uttered word by word, even sound by sound brokenly and fragmentally, let alone acquiring a satisfactory result 59 The result allows us to draw a conclusion that teachers should not only provide students with enough knowledge and give them more practice in pursuit of reaching a nearly native like speech, but also expose their students to actual context of communication Having more chances to get accustomed to the accent of the native speakers, students would gradually move on to higher efficiency of speech performance as well as sharpen their target speaking skills 4.2.4 Causes of errors and negative transfers in learning and using English It is fact that social pragmatic reasons play a part among the causes that lead to students’ difficulties and obstacles in producing English sounds satisfactorily and partially hinder their improvement if there are any The first cause need mentioning is one of students’ backgrounds As stated in the questionnaires, 57 out of 100 students live in the North and the South of Lao where the rhythm of life is not as fast and dynamic as that in the two ends of the country of Laos Meanwhile, the learners in Vientiane Capital may be endowed with modern and well-equipped facilities such as cassette recorders, the lasted software, reference books, or CD… which really those wonders in their second language learning and acquisition The root of the reason sometimes places in this fact Besides, table 4.1 illustrates that the students asked undergo different levels of English Among these students, over half are in the third, the forth, and the fifth year Actually, these students all have already learnt some basic to complicated lessons of Phonetics and Phonology so that they would have the knowledge of how the sounds are produced, how the articulation works and how the vocal cords act… to make accurate pronunciation Hence, they were all hopefully estimated to have good performances of the English sounds in the diagnostic test though it turned out 60 at last in marked contrast to the practice of testing The first and the second year students have not got any of those lessons, therefore, they might not excel at pronunciation, compared with those senior ones That may be the reason why a large number of the participants in the recordings hardly flourished their phonological and had satisfactory performances Actually, the learning process cannot deny the extremely important role of the external guide Students are likely to enlarge their phonological knowledge and sharpen their pronunciation if they are thoroughly told what to do, how to manage with the especially complex sounds The role of guidance is inevitable after all However, if there is essential guidance, it cannot be brought into play due to the limited time spent on the subject As shown in table 4.2, pronunciation takes the second smallest time in comparison with other language items such as grammar structure, reading comprehension Hence, student’s poor knowledge and pronunciation inability, especially of English sounds at word-initial and final position, may be put down to the least investment in the subject Besides, such necessary subject like Listening is just scattered randomly during the course of learning As clearly seen, the results in the diagnostic test did bring us the awareness of the mutual relationship between production and perception in second language learning Trubetzkoy advocated that L2 sounds are not adequately produced because they were not correctly perceived and vice versa [cited in 22] It is the shortest view about the unequal role of production and perception that prevents students from reaching the expected outcome The situation urges teachers to establish the efficiency of pronunciation teaching methods that emphasizes initial training both in production and perception, that is to say, both speaking 61 (and pronunciation in particular) and listening should be integrated regularly and logically for the sake of better improvement among the students The language learning needs the aid of many external factors However, most of the students were not be given such a good environment for practising and perfecting their pronunciation Students not have many chances to put into practice what they have learnt; 50% of the students confess the undeniable fact Hence, without the exposure to various native accents, how can these students get acquainted with the way English is actually spoken, let alone performing well in spontaneous exchanges Again, the problem of facilities is always one of crucial importance 10% of the students put their various pronunciation mistakes down to the lack of suitable facilities Certainly, with poorly-equipped classroom and shortage of modern devices used, no wonder did the pronunciation of these students fell far short of the expectation Besides, the practice of teaching and training in the University let me realize that materials for reading and doing research are very necessary for university students, as they are mature enough to decide what to read, how to read and deal with their self-study Meanwhile, the fact of material lacking stands in contrast to the need of gaining more knowledge To some extend, lack of materials does not mean the shortage of books or references, but of the really interesting and helpful ones which can give students good motivation for learning Once they are motivated, they can, sooner or later, become competent pronouncers This turns out the question of not the students themselves but of the authorities who are in charge Much as the external factors keep a part in the problem, the students themselves can wash away all the difficulties if they have the bravery to win everything, the desire to learn, and the will to perfect themselves Although 62 the students in the questionnaires are mostly aware of the importance of speaking and pronunciation practising among the four skills of communicative English, they rarely use English for exchanging information or any purposes of communication As lack of practice somehow means possible shortcomings in pronunciation, it is crucial for students to involve themselves in speech training as much as possible on the ground that “Practice makes perfect” Besides, we can see how wrong the students are when they make light of listening while it is really an indispensable skill in learning a second language They may not realize the very correlation between speaking and listening Actually, how could they speak well if they could not realize the sounds and imitate the way native speakers pronounce them? How could they excel at listening once they make numerous mistakes in pronunciation and that really affects their perceptional competence? The situation in the diagnostic test would have been better if students have ever had this awareness before-hand Besides, it is the unbalanced focus on accuracy and fluency that may cause pronunciation problem for most of the Laotian students Although the students had different ideas about the importance of maintaining accuracy and fluency during speech, they all did not consider the role of the two factors equally, but either esteemed this and made light of that or pay no attention to any of the two This wrong view-point eventually might throw students into a situation in which the listener tried in vain to make clear their delivery of speech Perhaps, central to the causes is the different sound systems in English and Laotian languages As the sound system of English bears little resemblance to that of Laos, and many English sounds does not have their 63 counterparts in Laos language, the Laotian students of English undoubtedly jumped into various troubles and difficulties in pronouncing English sounds, and sound cluster, let alone performing them well in word level and sentence level That must be the reason why many students tended to substitute English sounds with another sounds in Laos, or add, or omit a particular sound to facilitate the movement of the tongue Actually, the awareness of such differences, to some extent, is really important and needs to be raised among the students That is why a procedure called Contrastive analysis was developed This was founded on the belief that it was possible, by establishing the linguistic differences between learners’ L1 and L2, to predict what problems the learners of a particular L2 would face Hence, once they know that the interference of their mother tongue does make up the mistakes made, they will prevent, more or less, this transferring in order to reach a nearly native like accents However, only a small number of the students confess to take any notice of such differences, making them impossible to reach the mastery of spoken English Hence, teachers should frequently make a comparison of the foreign language with the native language of the students and guide them to right pronunciation from the very onset of their learning stage [28] Thanks to this procedure, students would try best not to substitute sounds that not exist in English to pronounce English sound, as well as adding or swallowing sounds to avoid producing complicated clusters of consonant 4.3 SUMMARY Through the data collected, students’ actual performance of English sounds in word and sentence level gradually comes to light It seem that the common mistakes made by the Laotian students in the National University of 64 Laos are the sound substitution, sound elision, schwa [@] epenthesis, and the enunciation of every sounds in pronouncing clusters of consonant It seems to be rather far-fetched to expect any good performances in the part of sentencereading as the students had their minds occupied with many things, both psychological factors and limited phonological competence The problem hindered the students from perfecting their speech varied from one to one However, nothing happens without any cause and so does the case The reason, therefore, must be reconsidered by both students and teachers so as to find suitable solutions for the problem 65 Chapter Five CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 5.1 CONCLUSIONS The research outcome poses some problems that the students of National University of Laos faced when they pronounced English sounds in word-level and sentence-level Although three-month conducting the research did not prove to be long enough for sufficient and adequate results to take place, it did, to some extend, present the actual practice of students’ performance of English sounds and urge us to think of the problem more thoroughly and seriously than ever before Insightfully, the study outcome indicate the not-to-mention-alarmed problem in which English sounds have become the most troublesome for the Laotian to produce, regardless of being in isolated words or in sentences Here are some conclusions from the result analysis: - In terms of perception, students failed to discriminate between some minimal pairs of sounds such as [dZ] and [Í], [s] and [z], [s] and [S], [z] and [S] though the speaker seemed to slowly enunciate word by word rather than produce sounds in connected speech Besides, students, especially those from the South of Laos sometimes found themselves confused with [p] and [b] both at initial or final position compared with those of other parts of the country What is more, recognizing consonant clusters were not the tough task for 66 these Laotian students to fulfill and therefore, their perception of these clusters of sounds was quite good - In terms of production, students made a lot of more serious mistakes which were presented as follows In word level: • Already found hard in distinguishing the minimal pairs, these students tried in vain to pronounce some difficult sounds like [dZ], [Í], [z], [S] or [T], [D] with satisfactory performance and often resorted to the [s] for the former, and [t] for the latter This result clearly matches the first hypothesis • They had a pronunciation tendency of substituting difficult sounds which rarely existed in their own language with other new, “creative” ones This was due to the possibly latent co-existence of some underlying and potential variants that would be able to come out unexpectedly and uncontrollably • Possibly due to the free variant of some sounds in the dialects of Laos (for example [l], [v], [w], [r]) and the influence of psychology factors that made some students get confused between the [l] and [v] or [w] and [v], [l] and [r] Therefore these pairs were being switched and substituted unconsciously • More seriously, as the final consonants are not heard and such phonetic features as final release are not realized in Laos, Laotian students always have the final ones unreleased and their initial sounds un-aspirated, causing much comprehension problem 67 • The epenthesis of the schwa [@] seemed to be favorable among the students of Laos as they tended to add [@], especially after the final sounds, which accidentally made them unnaturally released, might mislead to the understanding of other sounds • Standing in marked contrast with the result in the testing of students’ perception, the result of their production seemed to witness much pronunciation errors with clusters of consonants The students may either uttered the devoiced sounds in the cluster with a clear voice or even riskily dropped them or added schwa [@] Besides, it is unmanageable for the students to pronounce the consonant cluster [spl] as they made the voicless [s] seriously voiced Despite how may kinds of mistakes the students made, in all likelihood they would strongly affect the delivery of speech and even block comprehension There is a correspondence between the result and the second hypothesis of the study • The result positively answered the question of whether any correlation between the pronunciation errors made by Laotian students and their different regional factors, coinciding with what predicted in the third hypothesis Of which, mistakes made by students from the North of Laos seemed to constitute higher percentage than other places of the country Their typical mistakes were that they were inclined to defectively pronounce the sounds as [s], [kh], or [c] That was because most of them could not make the friction between the tongue and the palate to make the affricate [dZ] and [Í] Besides, students came from the South of Lao could not pronounce the voiceless aspirated stop [ph] properly, but had the 68 fricative [f] instead This error may be derived from the co-existence of free variants ([ph] and [f]) in Laos, especially in the Svannakhet dialect Therefore, pronunciation teacher should have particular methods to treat these specific problems as well as to prevent these errors from wide spreading into different parts of the country In sentence level: • In sentence level, nearly all the mistakes made in pronouncing sounds in isolated sounds repeated themselves, even more than once or twice Of which, cluster of consonant seemed to be the most troublesome sounds for the students to make They broke both their accuracy and fluency Besides, they showed no sign of the linking or any modification in the aspects of connected speech; what they performed was just mere enunciation rather than pronunciation - The causes of the problems are varied They may be objective ones which include students’ background, students’ learning maturity, less investment on the practice of pronunciation, less efficient pronunciation teaching methods that emphasizes initial training both in production and perception, lack of good learning devices or facilities, lack of appealing materials, or students’ scarcity of time and chances interacting with the native speakers as well as actively using English for exchanging information… Besides, the difference of the sound system of Laos and English and the transferring tendency of the mother tongue into the second language learning hindered students from reaching a satisfactory result of English sound production… However, the subjective causes which included students’ industriousness and attitude towards the practice of pronunciation, turn out to be the most decisive of all 69 The findings, to some extent, well support the hypothesis Some implications for the improvement are very necessary 5.2 TEACHING ACTIVITIES FOR FURTHER APPLICATION IN CLASSROOM 5.2.1 Teaching activities have been used so far by pronunciation teacher, especially when they teach the pronunciation of English consonants As stated by most of the students, although some methods such as peerteaching correction and teacher correction of pronunciation mistakes have been used so far in classroom activities, the time invested in such correction is not much Perhaps, due to the arrangement of the syllabus that only gives students of the first year the first simple lessons of speech training and students of the second year some further insight into the subject named Phonetics, that teachers not have much time on correcting pronunciation mistakes for the students On the contrary, it might also say that the ignorance of correction that accidentally gives chances for the repetition of same errors over and over again The students’ failure in producing English sounds and sound clusters in both word level and sentence level to some extent can be treated as deriving from such factors From the information in Table 4.9, it seems that pronunciation students use the traditional ways to teach pronunciation That is to say, they sometimes get their students involved in listening exercises wherein students can gradually get accustomed to how the native speaker utters the sounds, and likewise Besides, by giving the phonetic transcription of the words, students can stand a chance to know how to read the dictionary for perfect pronunciation As dictionaries use special symbols to show pronunciation and 70 they can sometimes be able to replace the role of the teacher, students will find themselves more independently and actively in their learning The selfstudy, under any circumstances, does bring a lot of benefit However, such vocabulary exercises like finding homophones, homographs, or homonyms also appeared with high frequency in the practising of pronunciation This is a matter need reconsidering as the exercises are totally not match to the purposes and aims of learning pronunciation; in fact they seem to be only extremely useful for learning vocabulary and new words Perhaps, on the way finding ways to improve students’ phonological ability but intentionally try not to make them bored with the merely tough pronunciation exercise, teachers integrate pronunciation into other activities, particularly in this case learning pronunciation through learning new words However, this way somehow is very disadvantageous, as it does not give students chances to practise the sounds orally, and interactively, making the situation likely to get worse 5.2.2 Recommendation for further teaching activities The teaching of pronunciation by no means focuses on the every sound of the foreign language, but the sounds in disguise and in combination with other sounds in an unbroken stream of the articulation However, it does not mean students should develop a command of handling sounds in such successive clusters of sounds and neglect how a separate sound is actually produced The practice of the Laotian students’ performance might be also due to the ignorance of correction of very minor mistakes that made the very simple mistakes repeated over and over again, giving space for the mistakes to evolve into “errors” 71 In fact, if any separate sounds could not be pronounced with right place and appropriate manner of articulation, hardly could they survive in any higher requirement of speech Hence, is it proper for pronunciation teachers to pay much attention to the articulation of the every sound before put it into play with other sounds in words and sentences?! Yes, it ought to deal with the most basic and fundamental lessons before reaching more complicated ones It ought to begin with controlled practice to form right habits first before getting acquainted with less-controlled, guided and communicative ones These activities specially designed are not beyond that ultimate goal.(See appendix D) 5.3 LIMITATION AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH The study has just touched the problems of pronunciation errors made by Laotian students concerning the English consonants and consonant clusters Some further issues are still left unsolved such as: - The problems of distribution of the consonants in the onset and coda position with the vowels which may cause the errors in pronunciation; - The causes that lead to the switching of consonant variants at the same position in the onset or coda in the syllable structure [...]... done to gather the information about the students actual performance of pronunciation in English The first component of this task dealt with the detecting of pronunciation mistakes in students perception and understanding of the English words in sentences Information collected was judged to identify the mistakes in recognizing the phonetic features of consonants in initial and final position in the syllable... tables, and analyzing and interpreting the data in the light of the research objectives The first part of the survey has been done with the aim of eliciting information about the current situation of the students pronunciation of English at Laos National University The data collected from this part were 27 counted to give both qualitative and quantitative information about the length of their English. .. well as the phonetic features that members of classes of consonants may have in pronunciation Also, the phonetic features of the subsyllabic elements in the internal structure of the syllable in English and Lao can be taken into consideration for a contrastive analysis with which our assumptions are made about the potential errors that Laotian students may have in performing their pronunciation of English. .. their attitude about the subjects of their course and their problems in pronunciation - At the second stage, Laotian students as informants were asked to read or say the words, phrases, sentences that contain problematic sounds Their performance was recorded and transcribed normally for the analysis The similar sounds and the exotic sounds in the Laotian students performance of English were recorded... 43% of students live in Vientiane Capital, while the rest live and study in the northern and the southern provinces for a long time and therefore, cannot get advantages of the facilities there Besides, the length of their study at school somehow would constitute to the productivity of the research In fact, the Laotian students as the informants have undergone different maturity of English learning 45%... them think pronunciation practising is very important (67%), and the rest think it is important Much as the students all realize the importance of pronunciation in language learning, their frequency of using English as a means of communication is various and differs from this to that individual 62% of the students just sometimes practise pronunciation, keeping the highest percentage of all Few of them... system in English and Lao, and then some hypotheses are drawn from the preliminary assumptions about students pronunciation competence These hypotheses are tested with qualitative and quantitative result from the data collected from questionnaires and direct recording 3.2 HYPOTHESES With the preliminary information from the comparison between phonetic system of English and that of Laotian language... [guang] The word used in Laos for “province” - [kwaeng] - may be pronounced [kaeng] (without the “w”) colloquially The second point that should be noted in the contrastive analysis of English and Lao consonants is the presence of the consonant clusters in the former and the absence of consonant clusters in the latter It is argued that there is no consonant cluster in Lao for the linguistic fact that the. .. or indicates their attitude of being so proud and even self-satisfied with their own ability Much as students all realise the importance of pronunciation in language learning, the recognition of difficulties associated with pronunciation in oral 35 communication is various and differs from student to student 59% of the students state that problems with conducting communication by using the foreign language... them confidently deny the overwhelmed influence of any communicative difficulties However, still are some students who do not get themselves really involved in any conversations in which English is the main thread facilitating the process of exchanging information, that they are not aware of any existent difficulties in their oral communication 4.1.1.5 Students difficulties in practising pronunciation ... Huaphanh Luangphabang Luangphabang Luangphabang Xiengkhouang Vientiane Vientiane Vientiane Vientiane Vientiane Vientiane Vientiane Vientiane Vientiane Vientiane Vientiane Vientiane Vientiane Vientiane... common pronunciation errors that Laotian students at the English Department at the National University of Laos may have in pronouncing English consonant sounds and sound clusters 1.4 ORGANIZATION... 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 part of the