LV English intonation in discourse of first year students

Chapter One INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale As for language learners, good pronunciation is quite desirable This derives from the fact that poor pronunciation skills can undermine learners’ self-confidence, restrict social interactions, and negatively influence estimation of a speaker’s credibility and abilities No wonder many students want to be able to speak English well, with a pronunciation which can be easily understood by both their fellow students and by English people However, it may seem confusing to talk of “good pronunciation” only without specifically pointing out how good the learner’s pronunciation should aim to be Traditionally, most pronunciation teaching and learning tends to concentrate on individual sounds, which although the most obvious, is not sufficient enough for good pronunciation Clearly, besides the sound system, other aspects of pronunciation such as linking, stress, and especially intonation are equally important Besides, it is essential to remember that a student who can pronounce and recognize every English sound may still be unintelligible and unable to understand the spoken English if he has not mastered English stress and intonation patterns, important factors in the skill of communication Pedagogically, as Kenworthy (1988) puts it in the book titled “Teaching English pronunciation”, a good pronunciation should be the mastery of individual sounds-segmental features, as well as stress, linking, and intonation-suprasegmental ones Among such suprasegmental features, intonation is considered what makes a learner of English sound like native In addition, Baker (1982) stresses that “in the speech of advanced learners, departures from what we regard as desirable are said to be more often matters of intonation than matters of how individual sounds are made” In spite of that, due to its inherent complexity and to the ensuring difficulty in learning and mastering it, intonation was ignored for many years in language teaching However, it is slowly gaining recognition as an integral part of language fluency, competence, and proficiency Furthermore, at a time when the language learning task is geared to instant interpersonal communication with efficiency and precision, the intonation phenomena could not have gone unnoticed in the preparation of English teaching syllabus as well as the pronunciation practice of all students of English Practically, most students of English at Danang University face big difficulties with intonation Undeniably, they also have problems with the pronunciation of some vowels, consonants, stress, and linking Nevertheless, intonation is one of the most concerning In fact, it is often complained that a majority of students tend to speak English flatly, i.e their voices not either go up or down Moreover, in my own observation of students of English at Danang University, it can be argued that a great number of students are not aware of how to vary their pitch properly It is certain that applying intonation in speech is not an easy task for Vietnamese learners of English Added to this, students at Danang University not have many chances to practice pronunciation in general and intonation in particular as the allocation time for pronunciation courses is limited, only thirty periods in the first semester in the total of eight semesters Due to time limit, students hardly have good pronunciation as required, and pronunciation teachers are unable to fully observe and recognize the learners’ progress as well as diagnose their problems It seems that most of the teachers are aware of students’ intonation deficiency but it is not easy to get answer to the question: “What exactly is wrong and why?” From this context, there is an urgent need to investigate problems students of English at Danang University experience with intonation and to suggest some implications for the teaching of English pronunciation Therefore, it is worthwhile conducting a study analyzing English intonation in discourse of first-year students of English 1.2 Aims and objectives 1.2.1 Aims Personally, through the study, the researcher hopes to find out the areas of difficulty in applying intonation in speech of students of English at Danang University, and to suggest some effective teaching activities to improve the situation 1.2.2 Objectives Three main objectives guide the study: The first objective is to describe intonation and its important features The second objective is to discover some common intonation mistakes in discourse of the first-year students of English The third objective is to suggest some implications for English pronunciation teaching 1.3 Research questions With these objectives in mind, answers to the following questions are sought: What is intonation? What are important features of intonation? What are common intonation mistakes in discourse of first-year students of English at Danang University? What are the mechanisms leading to these mistakes? What are some ways to teach intonation effectively? 1.4 Scope of the study In this research paper, it is not my ambition to investigate all English intonation patterns experienced by students of English at Danang University Instead, I mainly deal with those that help with the analysis of students’ intonation in spontaneous exchanges In addition, with the limitation of time and my ability, I just focus on first-year students of English at Danang University Also, many factors affecting the problem, such as the different accents of different students coming from different places, or how long they have learned English before attending to college etc… are not included here 1.5 Preview of organization The study is organized into five parts as follows: In Chapter One-Introduction- the role of intonation in cross-linguistic study will be presented Besides, it also includes the general situation of Vietnamese learners of English when applying intonation in discourse Chapter Two-Review of Literature- begins with the introduction of intonation and the description of its important features Also, some concepts related to the matter investigated are clarified Intonation functions are then dealt with The chapter concludes with the review of some previous studies on intonation Chapter Three-Method and Procedure- presents the research design and method, the generated hypotheses, the description of the population and sample The way to collect and analyze data will be introduced in this chapter with the study’s reliability and validity Chapter Four- Presentation of Findings- presents the results of actual pronunciation performances of first-year students at Danang University In Chapter Five-Discussion of Findings- the discussion about the results through testing the hypotheses will be included In the final chapter, Chapter Six-Conclusion and Implications- the conclusion on the study will be made Also, some implications for the practical solutions will be put forward Chapter Two REVIEW OF LITERATURE 2.1 Background to intonation In this section, I will outline some of the background concepts related to intonation as developed in the phonology and intonation literature 2.1.1 The concept of intonation So far there have been many ideas on what intonation is Cruttenden (6:9), for example, seems to equate intonation specifically with pitch movement Dauer and Grant have their own definitions of intonation as “the changes in the pitch of the voice over time” (7: 310) or as “the rise and fall in the pitch of the voice” (10:133) Obviously, there are many definitions with different ways of expressing what intonation is Pitch, however, is the common thread running through most descriptions In order to capture the best meaning of intonation, the following definition would be chosen as an operational definition for the development of this research paper: “Intonation is the variations in the pitch of a speaker’s voice used to alter or convey meaning” (Roach, 1992:56) The span of speech over which an intonation pattern extends is called a tone unit Within a tone unit there is usually a single syllable that stands out because it carries the major pitch change A syllable of this kind is called the tonic syllable The pitch changes that begin on the tonic syllable continue until the beginning of the next tone unit 2.1.2 Intonation features For Cruttenden (6:35), intonation has three important features: the division of a stream of speech into intonation units, the selection of a syllable (of a word), which is assigned the ‘tonic’ status, and the selection of a tone for the intonation unit Accordingly, this research studies three major features of intonation: intonation units, tonic syllables, and tones; all of which to some extent embrace the whole phenomenon of intonation 2.1.3.Tone unit The phenomena of intonation in English should have a piece of utterance as its basis to study all kinds of voice movements and features 2.1.3.1 Definition Roach (27: 282) suggests that for the purpose of analyzing intonation, a unit generally greater in size than the syllable is needed, and this unit is called the toneunit The tone unit can be thought of as the building block of spoken English Specifically, when speaking, unless people are reciting from a prepared script, they all make slips of the tongue, hesitate, repeat, and have to make corrections but in general they manage to deliver the message they intend That is they not simply speak one sound after another or even one word after another; they organize the message into units of information, tone units All spoken English is made up of tone units An utterance can be quite short, consisting of a single tone unit as follows: Water is a liquid but most utterances consist of several tone units For example, the following sentence has two tone units: She sat by the window,⏐ reading a letter (18: 100) 2.1.3.2 Characteristics Each typical tone unit: + is set off by pauses before and after + contains one prominent element + has an intonation contour of its own + has a grammatical coherent internal structure 2.1.3.3 Tone unit boundary Tone unit boundaries are identified by the presence of a pause preceding by a lengthening of the intonation contour at the end of the last word; if a word is cut off in the middle, it is considered to have a fully produced intonational boundary Hence, pauses are taken as tone units’ boundaries Sometimes, speakers not actually pause completely at the end of a tone unit within a sentence; but they slow down, change the pitch of their voice, and lengthen the final syllables as if they were going to pause 2.1.3.4 Tone unit in relation with tonic syllable and tone A tone unit is usually divided into several parts The most important part contains the syllable on which the change of pitch begins: the tonic syllable In other words, every tone unit has a tonic syllable-and therefore one of the five tones Each simple tone-unit has one and only one tonic syllable; this means that the tonic syllable is an obligatory component of the tone-unit In short, a tone unit is distinguished by containing a single complete pitch pattern and a tonic syllable Within each intonation unit in English, a speaker must make two choices: 1.Where does the major fall or rise in pitch occur? That is, what is the location of tonic syllable? 2.Which tone or pitch pattern will be used? That is, will there be a fall or rise at the end of the tone unit? 2.1.4.Tonic syllable 2.1.4.1 Sentence stress Stress in speech is the greater prominence which is given to one or more words in a sentence as compared with the other words of the same sentence In English this great prominence is achieved by uttering the stressed words with greater force of exhalation and muscular tension than the unstressed words, as well as by a change in the pitch and by an increase in the length of stressed syllables of words in the sentence Consider sentence stresses in the following examples: Water is a ٰ liquid (a) ٰ (b) ٰ She ٰ sat by the w ٰ indow,⏐ٰ reading the ٰ letter (18: 100) Any word can be prominent if the speaker thinks it is important in a sentence, but some kinds of words are much more likely to be prominent than others It is generally the case that one word is stressed more than any other since it possesses the highest information content for the discourse utterance, that is, it informs the hearer most The group of words described above is largely from what is called “content” words as opposed to “function” words From suprasegmental viewpoint, on the basis of being stressed or not, the classification can be presented as follows: Table Classification of stressed and unstressed words Content/Stressed words Function/Unstressed words verbs modal auxiliaries nouns articles adjectives conjunctions adverbs prepositions question words pronouns prepositional adverbs negatives (12: 139-151) 2.1.4.2 Tonic syllable 2.1.4.2.1 Definition The last prominent syllable in a tone unit is called the tonic syllable Brazil defines it as “where the most noticeable pitch movement occurs and hence the place where the choice of tone is made” (4: 195) 2.1.4.2.2 Position The location of the tonic syllable is of considerable linguistic importance The most common position for this is on the last content word of the tone unit (28:336) For example, “liquid” in Water is a `LIquid ٰ is usually considered to contain the tonic syllable However, if some one was discussing kinds of liquids and for contrastive purpose, there will be a change in the position of tonic syllable: liquid `WAter is a ٰ In communication, the speaker has to make choice of the place in an utterance where the movement in pitch begins (choice of tonic syllable) The choice depends on what the speaker wishes to emphasize For example, in She came last `SAturday the change in pitch would often be placed on the Sa of Saturday but in a dialogue such as: A: She never comes on Saturdays B: But she came `LAST Saturday a change in pitch would start on last A question does arise as to what happens to the previously stressed syllables They still get stressed, however, not as much as the tonic syllable, producing a three level stress for utterances 2.1.4.2.3 Functions A tonic syllable is used to: - give an emphasis: (a) It was very `BOring (unmarked) (b) It was `VEry boring (emphatic) - make contrast: (a) Do you like this one or THAT one? (b) I like `THIS one - give new information: (a)What's your NAME? (b)My name's `GEORGE 2.1.5.The concept of tone 2.1.5.1 Pitch 2.1.5.1.1 Definition When people speaking, some sounds or groups of sounds in their speech can be heard relatively higher or lower than others This relative height of speech sounds as perceived by a listener is called pitch Pitch is produced by the vocal cords vibrating Pitch produced depends on how fast the vocal cords vibrate: the faster they vibrate, the higher the pitch In intonation, it is concerned about the different heights of the pitch over syllables 2.1.5.1.2.Characteristics In English pitch is not distinctive at word level At the utterance level, on the other hand, pitch is very distinctive Pitch varies continuously from the moment a speaker begins speaking to the moment he/she ends, and this kind of variation has a certain communicative significance 10 Chapter Four PRESENTATION OF FINDINGS This chapter consists of two parts The first part will be the overall presentation of the students’ intonation performances in comparison with the native’s The second part will present the results of the statistical analysis Data obtained from free conversations were analyzed into three categories: the division of tone units the placement of tonic syllables and the choice of tones 4.1 Presentation of English intonation performed by Vietnamese students To elicit the intonation pattern for data analysis, twenty-four first-year students were divided into groups of and talk about the topic “My family” The typical intonation contours go as follows: 23 4.2 Results of students’ performances of English intonation in spontaneous exchanges 4.2.1 Results of tone unit division Table Tone units divided by VS U by No of expected tone units(by NS) No of tone units (by S) VS1 VS2 VS3 VS4 VS5 VS6 VS7 VS8 6 VS9 2 VS10 VS11 VS12 VS13 VS14 2 VS15 2 VS16 3 VS17 VS18 2 VS19 4 VS20 2 VS21 2 VS22 VS23 VS24 24 4.2.2 Results of tonic syllable assignment Table Tonic syllable assignment by VS U by No expected tonic syllables Students’ performances VS1 VS2 2 VS3 VS4 VS5 VS6 VS7 VS8 VS9 2 VS10 VS11 VS12 VS13 VS14 2 VS15 2 VS16 3 VS17 VS18 2 VS19 VS20 VS21 VS22 VS23 VS24 25 4.2.3 Results of students’ choice of tones Table Results of students’ choice of tones Expected tone (by NS) No students’ choice of tone Falling tone Level tone Falling tone Rising tone 24/24 15(63%) 8(34%) 1(3%) A series of Table 3, Table 4, and Table shows students’ intonation performances in three areas corresponding to intonation’ major features: tone unit division, tonic syllable assignment, and choice of tones Table presents how the students divide their utterances into tone units There is certain difference between the way VS and NS organize their utterances into tone units Regarding the number of tone unit per one utterance, up to 62% VS (15 out of 24 subjects) takes more tone units than expected About 38% VS deliver their message in the same way as the NS does Table 26 CHAPTER FIVE DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS The discussion of statistical results in this chapter is organized in the order of three hypotheses generated in Chapter Three 5.1 Hypothesis one discussion Hypothesis 1: Vietnamese students may fail to divide a sentence into tone units in the way English natives As previously stated, when speaking, native speakers not say word after word but manage to deliver the message they intend by organizing it into units of information, tone units They not generally run all the words together in a stream of equally emphasized words Instead, they group words by their meaning, and pause between them This allows them to speak in phrases or tone units, and to pause just after important information that they emphasize The findings from the students’ performances support what was hypothesized as the problem for VS when organizing their messages The study reveals that many Vietnamese students not divide their utterances into tone units as native speakers In general, the trend students manage with their sentences can be organized into categories: First, they divide their utterances into tone units as the native English However, just nearly 38% (9 out of 24 subjects) really know how to arrange their sentences properly 27 For example: My father is a doctor and my mother is a teacher VS9 NS Second, as compared with the expected tone unit division by the native speaker, the students in this study up to 62% students (15 out of 24 subjects) make so many extra pauses Let’s look at another example, where the sentence should be divided into tone units, instead of 7: I think I like talking to my mother because I think I share the difficult problem with her VS10 NS Obviously, a large number of students not know how to divide their messages through appropriate numbers of tone units Normally, many students pause in the middle of tone units instead of at the end of them This explains why they are described to speak in a “halting style” Furthermore, they tend to be in the habit of saying word after word without grouping the message into tone units These can be traced back to reasons: First, they have to stop to think or to take a new breath Second, they are unaware of such tone unit division Third, it is because of the language constraints It can be argued that because students are using language with which they are not yet very familiar; therefore they have to hesitate, take pauses However, it should be remembered that NS in speech hesitate, too It is true that in some case, there are pauses, repetitions, and false starts in speech of a native speaker However, they try to deliver their message as a whole They try to speak a tone unit without any breaks in the continuity, any interval breaks or slips of the tongue In order to so, they 28 have to plan the tone unit before speaking Of course they have to stop to think but it is not within the tone units They may stop between tone units to plan what to say next Nevertheless, these kinds of pauses are not taken seriously as at times a pause or some kind of break can often be heard between tone units, but this is not necessarily the case While native speakers take a breath to begin a new tone unit, Vietnamese speakers stop whenever they want to Furthermore, they are not aware that “tone unit is pronounced at a certain rate and without any pause in it” As students try to get every word right, they tend to segment the text into more tone units which obscure the overall meaning of the text Consequently, they take so many pauses Vietnamese students may need to be taught how to divide speech into tone units and should understand how these units contribute to the meaning of speech They need to learn how to organize their message so that their speech flows smoothly to natives’ ears Finally, the monosyllabicity of basic Vietnamese units leads to learners’ separating English words rather joining them smoothly into a “stream of speech” This contributes to the staccato effect of a Vietnamese accent In short, the deviation of VS from English tone unit division is the excessive use of boundaries in long phrases They not group phrases together into smooth overall tone units as native speakers While right pausing may become a necessity to understand and to be understood well, this may lead to the incomprehensibility of their speech 5.2 Hypothesis two discussion Hypothesis 2: Vietnamese students may fail to assign tonic syllables In the course of an utterance by a NS, there should be one or more tone units Besides, within each tone unit, there is one syllable made more noticeable than the others Such one is called tonic syllable In general, for various purposes (as stated 29 in Chapter Two), a speaker will assign the tonic stress to different positions within a tone unit The results collected from the students’ spontaneous exchanges completely support the study’ s hypothesis, or in another way, this was “confirmed prediction” Not surprisingly, most of the students not make choice of the tonic syllable in their utterances Only 25% students are aware of the so-called tonic syllables Take the example: I have sisters: older sisters and one younger sister VS16 NS Nearly 30% students not give the sufficient number of tonic syllables For example, the number of tonic syllables of the following utterance should be 8, not 1: There are people in my family: my father, my mother, my sister, me and brothers VS8 NS The rest 49% completely assign no tonic stress to their sentences Take the following example: Clearly, students not make large difference between stressed and unstressed words As a result, a common mistake by VS is to have no one word with a major pitch change The explanation for this is the negative interference of the first language (Vietnamese) to the second language (English) Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language: each word in a sentence will receive a single stress In contrast, in English only some content words or emphasized words will receive stress 30 In addition, it is also assumed that they did not have sufficient knowledge on sentence stress, and that they might not have been taught how to stress English sentences adequately As a result, they often stress not only almost every content word but also some function words, regardless of the meaning of the sentence Learners who tend to have difficulty in stressing content words adequately may be likely to make problematic intonational errors in their speech Thus, they should be able to distinguish content words from function words before starting to learn how to put sentence-stress properly 5.3 Hypothesis three discussion Hypothesis 3: Vietnamese students may fail to apply the right tone in a sentence As statements were chosen as target sentences for analysis, falling tone is the suitable terminal tone Up to 63 % students ends their sentences in level tone For example, this student use level tone to end his sentence: I think I like talking to my mother because I think I share the difficult problem with her VS11 NS The choice of level tone can be explained as follows: Vietnamese is typically tonal, i.e each lexical item; even of a single syllable, will have a fixed tone or sequence of tones, irrespective of its contexts Thus the concept of a particular tone applying to a whole utterance, and being capable of variation for the sake of emphasis or attitude is quite strange to VS Consequently, students are ignorant of the fact that at the end of what they are saying, they have to lower their voice to show that they have finished 31 Sometimes the pitch level of the speaker’s voice does not fall far enough with final falling intonation Take this sentence for example: My father is a doctor and my mother is a teacher VS9 NS This can result in English speakers misinterpreting the intent of the learners’ utterances For example, an English speaker may misinterpret the statement as a question, or assume that the learner has not finished speaking Clearly, students are not aware that an extended flat or low-rising intonation at the end of a phrase indicate that a speaker intends to continue to speak 32 Chapter Six CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS 6.1 Conclusion This study is carried out based on the background to intonation and difference in tone between English and Vietnamese to identify problems that first-year students of English at Danang University have when applying intonation in free speech The results collected from the students’ actual performances of intonation in spontaneous exchanges indicate that students have difficulties dividing their utterances into tone units, deciding on the tonic syllables, and selecting the tone These results mostly supported three hypotheses generated in Chapter Three One of the main causes leading to these problems is the negative interference of the first language (Vietnamese) to the second language (English) Besides this main cause, there may be some other factors playing a role in the problem such as the students’ not taking serious learning and practising pronunciation at home or not having basic knowledge of English intonation… The study also attempted to suggest some effective teaching activities that may help students overcome these pronunciation problems and improve their pronunciation skill 6.2 Limitation of the study Since I know of no other studies that apply statistical methods to intonation values derived from natural discourse data (conversation), I have not had the luxury of being able to draw the method and procedure from previous research models Moreover, because of time constraint, I have covered other tone such as rising, rise fall, and fallrise in the intonation analysis 33 As intonation research is still in its toddle years, my research is not a typological relevant overview of Vietnamese’ intonation, but rather a first step towards intonation research Thus, mistakes and shortcomings are inevitable in the study I am extremely grateful and ready to receive any comments as well as remarks from readers 6.3 Implications for English intonation teaching Intonation has a reputation for being difficult and slippery Hence, it is not, on the whole, popular among language teachers or learners Nevertheless, the practical teacher and the realistic learner need not worry themselves too much with theory Certainly, we never sound like a native English speaker but at least we will have to get as close to it as we can Therefore, in order to interact intelligibly with one another, i.e to use intonation to attain fluency and precision of expression, students should expose themselves as much as possible to authentic listening materials As intonation operates unconsciously, this is the best way to acquire how it is applied in speech of native speakers Also, some activities of are suggested here to help students master intonation as a whole They are taken from several books with some adaptation to meet the abovementioned purposes Exercise A In an English sentence, there are two types of words: lexical (content) words which normally carry the most important information, and grammatical (function) words which normally show the syntactical relations Lexical words are stressed The Vietnamese learners tend to place stress on every word in the sentence irrespective of their functions They should be made to identify and produce stressed words appropriately by making them louder, longer and higher in pitch 34 Teach VS to send a telegram This helps them to understand the different level of importance of the words in sentence They are given a worksheet containing complete sentences They are asked to telegraph the message with the least money spent The first sentence is done as an example Sample worksheet A complete sentence Telegram 1.Will you send me the book I asked for? Send book I asked Please go home immediately, some visitors are waiting for you I should like to confirm the arrival of the flight SQ176 today I will arrive on Monday the first of November 1999, at 6:20 Exercise B Every learner is asked to give a presentation on a topic according to their free choice He/ She must write down the speech (not more than 50 words), mark the words he/she wants to be stressed Practise it in groups (of 4, for example) Then present it to the whole class His/her worksheet may look as follows: Presentation The Environment There have been many `causes of environment po`llution in our country These in`clude the `dumping of `chemicals on the `ground by factories, the sending of `smoke into the air by cars `motorbikes, Exercise C The learners are given a worksheet as seen below They are asked to listen and detect the stresses and the intonation of each phrase Then comes choral reading under the teacher’s conduct in rhythm, stress and intonation 35 Sample worksheet A Listen, mark the stresses and the intonation Then repeat after the tape Lan: Hi! My name’s Lan Maline: Hi, Lan.I’m Maline Lan: Where are you from ,Maline? Maline: I’m from Singapore.And you? Lan: I’m from Vietnam Exercise D “ Make it a question, please ” The learners are given a worksheet containing some statements The tape says each of the statements with a falling tone The learners use rising tone to turn it into a question Sample worksheet D Utterance Now, question,please 1.He’s come 2.She’s moving 3.He ? ? caught the ? bus 5.4 Recommendations for further study There is a need for further research into some other patterns of intonation Moreover, research into the influence of the places of birth of the students need to be done, too; as students coming from different places may have different problems in their pronunciation Research into this area will only be possible after some large scale research into the tones of students coming from different parts of the Central Region of Vietnam, both rural and urban areas, has been carried out 36 37 [...]... The first part of the study would deal with intonation concept and the description of important features of intonation Moreover, differences between Vietnamese and English in tone were presented to generate the hypotheses as the prediction of pronunciation of Vietnamese students of English These would be about the predicted intonation performances in discourse of Vietnamese students The second part of. .. context in English: it almost always conveys a feeling of saying something routine, uninteresting, or boring 13 2.1.5.2.4 Tone and intonation languages Tone language is one in which substituting one distinctive tone for another on a particular word or morpheme can cause a change in the lexical meaning of that word or phoneme, or in some aspect of its grammatical categorization Well-known examples are Chinese... as the main technique Since the research was to examine Vietnamese’s production of English intonation, it is preferable to be conducted in natural, rather than read or memorized discourse Furthermore, intonation in discourse is considered the most satisfactory way to collect data for intonation analysis The sample of 24 students was divided into 8 groups of 3 students Each group had some minutes to... 15 2.1 Review of previous studies So far there have been many officially published materials on English intonation D Robert Ladd (1996), a well-respected Canadian scholar of intonation, is keen on the description of intonation and the analysis of it in discourse Although the study makes an exceptionally clear presentation of the theory of intonational phonology, it mainly deals with linguistic purposes,... research into some other patterns of intonation Moreover, research into the influence of the places of birth of the students need to be done, too; as students coming from different places may have different problems in their pronunciation Research into this area will only be possible after some large scale research into the tones of students coming from different parts of the Central Region of Vietnam,... have when applying intonation in free speech The results collected from the students actual performances of intonation in spontaneous exchanges indicate that students have difficulties dividing their utterances into tone units, deciding on the tonic syllables, and selecting the tone These results mostly supported three hypotheses generated in Chapter Three One of the main causes leading to these problems... not finished speaking Clearly, students are not aware that an extended flat or low-rising intonation at the end of a phrase indicate that a speaker intends to continue to speak 32 Chapter Six CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS 6.1 Conclusion This study is carried out based on the background to intonation and difference in tone between English and Vietnamese to identify problems that first- year students of English. .. pitch and change of the pitch which is associated with the pronunciation of syllables of words and which affects the meaning of the word For example, in Vietnamese ga means railway station, but gà means chicken In contrast, tones in English are not distinctive This means that a change of tone will not result in a change of lexical meaning Tones in English do not change the meaning of the word with... negative interference of the first language (Vietnamese) to the second language (English) Besides this main cause, there may be some other factors playing a role in the problem such as the students not taking serious learning and practising pronunciation at home or not having basic knowledge of English intonation The study also attempted to suggest some effective teaching activities that may help students. .. is still in its toddle years, my research is not a typological relevant overview of Vietnamese’ intonation, but rather a first step towards intonation research Thus, mistakes and shortcomings are inevitable in the study I am extremely grateful and ready to receive any comments as well as remarks from readers 6.3 Implications for English intonation teaching Intonation has a reputation for being difficult ... general situation of Vietnamese learners of English when applying intonation in discourse Chapter Two-Review of Literature- begins with the introduction of intonation and the description of its important... analyzing English intonation in discourse of first- year students of English 1.2 Aims and objectives 1.2.1 Aims Personally, through the study, the researcher hopes to find out the areas of difficulty... features of intonation: intonation units, tonic syllables, and tones; all of which to some extent embrace the whole phenomenon of intonation 2.1.3.Tone unit The phenomena of intonation in English