INCORPORATING BASIC PHONETIC KNOWLEDGE INTO TEACHING SPEAKINH AT lehongphong HIGH SCHOOL

TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background and rationale 1.2 Aims of the study 1.3 Significance of the study Chapter Two: METHODOLOGY 2.1Study setting 2.2 Participants 2.3 Empirical teaching of ACS 2.3.1 The practice of ACS 2.3.1.1 Preparation stage 2.3.1.1.1 Material selection 2.3.1.1.2 Activities for teaching ACS 2.3.1.2 The teaching of ACS in practice 2.3.1.3 Pre-test and post-test 2.3.2 Evaluative instruments 2.4 Analytical framework Chapter Three: DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION 3.1 Results from the diagnostic test 3.1.1 Problems with rhythm 3.1.2 Problems with assimilation 3.1.3 Problems with elision 3.1.4 Problems with linking 3.2 Results from the achievement test(the Post-test) 10 Chapter Four: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS .13 4.1 Conclusion 13 4.2 Recommendations for applying ACS 14 4.2.1 The practitioners of ACS and teachers of English 14 4.2.2 Educational administrators 14 4.3 Strategies for teaching ACS 15 4.3.1 Strategies for teaching rhythm 15 4.3.2 Strategies for teaching linking 15 4.3.3 Strategies for teaching assimilation and elision 16 4.4 5.4 Suggestions for further study 17 REFERENCES 18 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background of the study It is common knowledge that English has become an international language and in Vietnam especially, it is nowadays considered crucial to job-seekers and scholarship hunters, as well as pursuers of higher education Thus, more and more students are taking international tests such as TOEFL and IELTS to find educational opportunities at overseas universities, and the TOEIC certificate is presently required by many Vietnamese universities as a necessary condition for graduation It is not just the matter of compulsory document that counts; a great number of Vietnamese people are learning how to better communicate in English because the 21th century is the era of globalization, in which English is the common language for most interactions, as stated by James (2001): “English is the language of globalization, of international business, politics It is the language of computers and the Internet it is the dominant international language in communications, science, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomacy ” Aspects of connected speech (hereafter reduced to ACS) belong to the suprasegmental sphere of phonetics and phonology which includes various issues, namely rhythm, assimilation, elision, and linking All of them exert a certain impact on the learner’s oral communication because their object is language in action and the interrelation between words in a sentence and even between sentences Notwithstanding such significance, these items have so far not been given commensurate recognition both from teachers and students at a high school level Here arises a question about whether it is possible to make the foreign language learning situation at high schools better through the introduction of basic knowledge about distinctive aspects of connected speech and whether the target students can incorporate this knowledge with their rudimentary command of segmental phonetics to achieve success in real-life communication The course of finding the answer to this question thus gives reason for the being of this study 1.2 Aim of the study Aspects of connected speech are too large a subject to study in full detail together with its pedagogical application within the limit of a research Therefore, the researcher would hereby certify that only basic features of the aspects of connected speech that help to improve learners’ oral communication will be examined With the scope defined above, the thesis aims at finding out the problems related to ACS faced by the students when they take part in authentic communication situations The researcher would, through this study, also like to investigate if the educational values of ACS can help the students better their oral communication, and assert the fact that aspects of connected speech should be introduced at a high school level to improve the students’ oral skill 1.3 Significance of the study The notion of bringing parts of the supra-segmental features, i.e ACS, into the teaching of English at high schools in Vietnam in general and at Le Hong Phong High School in particular has never been officially reported, so this research may complement the current practice of teaching and learning English at such educational institutions The study is intended for the advance of the students in oral communication It can, therefore, be hailed as a contribution to changing the viewpoints on teaching the oral skill, which hopefully bears fruit in reaching the standard of natural English CHAPTER METHODOLOGY In order to fulfill the aims of this study and come up with the answers to the research questions introduced in Chapter 1, the following methods are employed to carry out the study 2.1 Study setting The study was conducted at Le Hong Phong High School for the pupils in Thanh Hoa Province The school’s main targets are to train excellent students for the annual national exams and to teach them toward the university entrance exams so that they can stand a better chance of getting a place in the universities of their choice With these targets in mind, both teachers and students have to work hard together and the quality of teaching and learning at the school has been very good according to the ranking of the Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training 2.2 Participants The study was carried out with 82 participants from the two classes 10A2 Englishmajor and 10A6, literature-majored aged 16, who had been learning English intensively for a year These students were introduced to ACS after taking the pre-test with a view to discovering the progress made in their oral communication 2.3 Empirical application of ACS 2.3.1 The practice of ACS The practice of ACS consists of stages, namely preparation and implementation The preparation stage revolves around the tasks of choosing the materials for introducing ACS to the students and creating the attractive activities to help them acquire ACS at their best The second stage, implementation focuses on reviewing the practicality of teaching ACS at Le Hong Phong High School 2.3.1.1 Preparation stage 2.3.1.1.1 Material selection This is the first year (2014) when the new text book English 10, obviously designed to target communicative proficiency, is brought into its experimental stage Meritoriously, Le Hong Phong High school has been teaching this well-tailored material It is, therefore, convenient to utilise the speaking-skill sections of the book to introduce ACS 2.3.1.1.2 Activities for teaching ACS The activities for teaching ACS were selected and adapted from the those recommended by Celce-Murcia et al (1996, pp 8-9) However, only appropriate activities were used in the class because the researcher reckoned that it was beneficial to focus on some specific drills rather than applying too many kinds of them, which might result in the students’ distraction from the points being taught Some of the in-class activities are described in details in the table below Activities Aims Group work Preparatio n Procedure Listen and Imitate - Help acquaint the students with the rhythmic pattern of English as well as other ACS - Help teacher keep track of students’ performance and detect any problems encountered by them - The whole class repeat in chorus, then students drill individuall y - The tasks adapted from the book and the videos downloade d from Youtube - Let students watch the videos or listen to the recording then ask them to repeat after the voice they hear - Teacher explains further with the theories of ACS - Students practice by themselves and then present in front of the class Speed dictation - Enhance students’ recognition of the sounds - Give students an opportunity to be exposed to natural English - Work in group - Choose the suitable videos or recordings - Ask students to group themselves to compete against other groups in the class - Hand out pieces of paper for them to write down what they hear - Teacher decides the winner by comparing the students’ result with the reading Backchaining - Familiarize the students with ACS such as linking, elision and rhythm - In groups or individuall y - Prepare the backchaining sentences at home - Ask students to repeat in chorus - Call on some students to repeat individually - Ask for volunteer to repeat the long backchaining sentences using ACS Jumbled pictures - Help students use - In English naturally groups through story-telling - Enhance teamwork spirit and the students’ creativity in using language - Make photocopie s of the pictures - Prepare handouts of suggested - Divide the students into groups - Assign groups the same pictures of the same stories and ask them to rearrange the pictures to make a logical story - Ask a representative “The - Help students Pursuit of practice ACS with words” fun - Improve students’ game natural reaction in using ACS Act it out! - In groups or individuall y - To improve - In students’ oral groups fluency by using ACS - Give students more drills on ACS stories from each group to tell their story to the class - Prepare pictures of different themes with ideas or words hidden in them - Prepare gifts for the winners - Put the students into groups - Explain the rules of the game to the students - Ask the students to study the pictures carefully in 20 seconds and then speak out the words, phrases, or sentences the pictures suggest - Prepare handouts of short conversatio ns involving two or more speakers - Instruct students to act out the conversation using ACS - Choosing a board of judges to decide the winner 2.3.1.2 The teaching of ACS in practice The knowledge of ACS was introduced to the students for a duration of fourtyfive-minute periods The prominent characteristics of the instruction of ACS are summarized as follows At the very start of the academic year, the objectives of and rationale for introducing ACS were clarified to the students so that they could be prepared for attending the experimental teaching that would come later The teacher and researcher then set out to prepare the prerequisites for teaching ACS such as the lesson plans, the suitable activities, and teaching aids before embarking on guiding the students to obtain ACS As for the activities employed for teaching ACS, the researcher adapted the techniques and games as reviewed by Kelly (2000) and Celce-Murcia et al (1996) which were discussed earlier in the previous chapter Those activities include chaining, roleplaying, miming, listening and imitating, using visual aids, etc The selection of specific techniques and activities was largely based on the researcher’s teaching experience and was clearly stated in the sample lesson plan 2.3.2 Evaluative instruments The instruments that the researcher employed to sort out the results of the value of ACS were a pre- and post-test 2.3.2.1 Pre-test and post-test In order to test the students’ performance in oral communication in association with ACS, a pre-test was designed based on the foundation laid out in Chapter A set of twelve sentences was formed substantializing the different aspects of connected speech For the convenience of analysis, the test was put into parts The first three sentences were supposed to test the students on rhythm, the next three on assimilation, then on elision, and the last three on linking The post-test was actually the same as the pre-test to ensure the uniformity of the results collected so that the progress made could be clearly affirmed 2.4 Analytical framework Quantitative analysis of pre- and post-tests To determine the extent of progress made by the students in using ACS to better their oral communication after experimental teaching, a detailed analysis of the test was carried out The expected results from the scores gained by the students were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) of version 16.0 Firstly, it calculated the mean score of each part as well as the total score of the pre- and post-test Then a paired samples t-test was run to analyze any statistical difference in the mean gains between the pre- and post-test Some relevant statistical values such as standard deviation, degrees of freedom (d.f.), and Sig were also included to give evidence to the researcher’s conclusion of the students’ improvement in oral communication CHAPTER DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION This chapter analyzes and discusses the students’ results as obtained from the pretest and post-tests’ scores The analysis and discussion of findings chapter serves to discover the students’ difficulties in using ACS in communication and to find out the best approach to help them effectively learn to use ACS in oral communication naturally 3.1 Results from the diagnostic test (Pre-test) The test consisted of 12 questions covering all four aspects of connected speech surveyed in the study It required the students to read the model sentences in a way as natural as possible to the best of their ability Therefore, this section is further split up into the four themes closely following these aspects of connected speech: rhythm, assimilation, elision, and linking They will be presented in turn in the following four sub-sections 3.1.1 Problems with rhythm Amongst the 45 testees, a substantial number of 31 students that accounted for 68.9% scored good points (little or no problem) in the first three questions regarding rhythm This is followed by a less crowded group of 14 students (31.1%) who exposed the sole problem of not lending proper weight to different words in a sentence These students had a few problems with syllable-timed rhythm; they, however, had difficulty dealing with stress-timed rhythm and seemed to treat every word with equal importance resulting in the monotonous and non-rhythmic speech The data collected are presented in the following table Rhythm Problems Raw count Percentage No or little problem 31 68.9% Problems with stress-timed rhythm 14 31.1% Students’ problems with rhythm 3.1.2 Problems with assimilation The next three questions of the test were engineered for judging the students’ performance related to assimilation The researcher noticed a stark contrast to the favorable result obtained from analyzing the first three questions, which was presented in the chart below Students’ problems with assimilation The chart clearly manifests the lack of knowledge of ACS in casual oral communication All the respondents, as expected, could not handle regressive and coalescent assimilation; thus the output received revealed their unnaturalness in actual speech The only part of assimilation that the students proved to have no difficulty acquiring was to pronounce sequences of sibilant or stop consonants with only 8.9% failing to satisfy the examiner 3.1.3 Problems with elision The third part of the test looked into the students’ difficulty with elision Among the 34 test-takers, almost none showed serious problems in elision of weak vowels and /v/ in /əv/, but up to 64.4% underwent a hard time pronouncing consonant clusters They tended to pronounce all the consonants clearly, which makes their speech awkward and adversely affects fluency The table below summarizes the statistics discussed above Elision Type of problems Raw count Percentage Problems with weak vowels 4.4% Problems with elision of /v/ in /əv/ 2.2% Problems with consonant clusters 29 64.4% Students’ problems with elision The figures suggest a telling sign of great difficulties faced by students when they deal with consonant clusters As Loc (2008) asserts, there are no cases of three consonants standing one after another in a word in Vietnamese (i.e the students’ mother tongue); therefore, it causes a real hindrance to students’ acquisition of this aspect 3.1.4 Problems with linking The final test items served the researcher’s purpose of finding out the students’ trouble associated with linking sounds in English While the students reported in their questionnaires that they were familiar with linking, in practice many a problem were pinpointed Out of the 45 participants, more than a half (53.3%) did not link ending consonants to vowels in their speech The results were even more appalling as far as other linking techniques were concerned No single testee utilized glides in cases of two vowels standing one after another, and the same situation applied to the case of intrusive /r/ The data for these questions are visualized as follows Students’ use of linking techniques To sum up, the results of the pre-test brought to light the fact that the students did not have an adequate knowledge of ACS and they could not effectively apply what they assumingly had known in real life practice of producing natural speech 3.2 Results from the achievement test (Post-test) After weeks (with a total of forty-five-minute periods) of reviewing the knowledge of ACS, the students took the test again and the results were analyzed against those of the pre-test so that the researcher could assess the progress made by the students by comparing the two The statistics are illustrated in the following table: Problems Pre-test 31.1% 100% 100% 8.9% 2.2% 64.4% 53.3% 100% 100% Post-test 11.1% 24.4% 11.1% 4.4% 2.2% 17.7% 13.3% 62.2% 71.1% Table 4.3: Students’ results of the two tests Legends for the nine problems as shown in the table above are explained right below: Problem 1: Failure in using stress-timed rhythm Problem 2: Failure in using regressive assimilation Problem 3: Failure in using coalescent assimilation 10 Problem 4: Failure in using assimilation related to sequences of consonants Problem 5: Failure in omitting /v/ in /əv/ Problem 6: Failure in using elision for consonant clusters Problem 7: Failure in linking consonants to vowels Problem 8: Failure in using intrusive /r/ to link vowels Problem 9: Failure in using glides to link vowels As compared in Table 4.3, the extent of progress made by the students in overcoming their weaknesses was remarkable Of the nine problems they faced in the pre-test, up to eight had been successfully tackled after weeks reviewing ACS The results of the post-test showed an upward trend with an impressive improvement witnessed in the case of using coalescent assimilation In the pre-test no one among the student subjects could overcome the ordeal of utilizing this aspect However, the number of the students who could use this with ease in their speech soared to 89.9 percent in the post-test The two most problematic aspects for the students proved to be the use of the intrusive /r/ and glides in linking sounds The pre-test reported a disappointing fact that all the students could not handle these aspects, and the results of the post-test still did not satisfy the researcher teacher because only a marginal number of them (37.8% and 29.9% respectively) could apply these linking techniques in their natural speech Also noticeably, the students’ performance in dealing with regressive assimilation had revealed a wide discrepancy of 75.6% when the pre-test and post-test results were compared The researcher then compared the mean gains after the two tests, and the statistics were shown in the table below Pair Mean N Std Deviation Std Error Mean Pretest 4.47 45 968 144 Posttest 6.62 45 1.072 160 Table 4.4: Descriptive statistics of post-test scores As can be observed from this table, the mean score of the post-test was 6.62, much higher than that of the pre-test with a difference of 2.15 Therefore, it could be said that the experimental teaching did help improve the students’ scores which came to mean the improvement in oral communication competence 11 Paired Differences 95% Confidence Interval of the Difference Std Error Std Mean Deviation Mean Lower Upper Pre-test – Post-test -2.156 1.086 162 -2.482 T -1.829 -13.313 Df Sig 44 000 Table 4.5: A t-test for the mean difference between post- and pre-test scores Table 4.5 above presents the mean gains between the pre- and post-test scores It revealed that after one month of an intensive experimental course, the students made remarkable improvements which were indicated by the statistically significant total mean gains (with the Sig level lower than 05 for the observed t value of 13.3) It can then be inferred that the students could significantly improve their oral communication after being introduced to ACS It would be unsatisfactory to leave unexamined the four parts that made up the test to see whether the students failed to make progress in any part The results were presented in the following table Pre-test vs Posttest Part Part Part Part N Mean 45 45 45 45 -.556 -.722 -.633 -.244 Std deviation 373 459 007 313 T Df Sig -10.00 -10.55 -8.239 -5.239 44 44 44 44 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 Table 4.6: Descriptive statistics of the mean gains between post- and pre-test scores of different parts of the test The table obviously reinforced the belief that the knowledge of ACS could bring about improvements to the students’ oral communication Evidently, they showed progress in all the four parts of the test, namely rhythm, assimilation, elision, and linking with the Sig of 0.00 lower than the probability level of 05 They made the greatest progress in dealing with assimilation with the mean difference of 0.72, followed by elision at 0.63 As for rhythm and linking, the former saw more improvements with the mean difference of 0.55, and the students made the least progress with the latter – linking This could be understandable because this aspect of connected speech, as having been asserted earlier, was fairly familiar to the student subjects 12 13 CHAPTER CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS The final chapter of the study presents the conclusion drawn from the discussion of the findings of the research to give the answers to the two research questions Besides, the recommendations for the application of and the techniques for teaching ACS, as well as the limitations of the study and some suggestions for further studies are also included 4.1 Conclusion The current study was prompted by the need to examine the students’ difficulties in using ACS and find the way to help them and the teachers to solve the problems encountered in learning and teaching ACS In order to achieve these goals, it was based on the following two research questions as posed in Chapter 1: (1) What problems students encounter when they deal with connected speech? (2) To what extent can the introduction of ACS help students solve those problems and achieve better oral communication skill? The findings, as discussed in the previous chapter, show that: (1) The students faced a lot of problems related to ACS, which adversely affected their performance in oral communication There were nine problems of stresstimed rhythm, regressive assimilation, coalescent assimilation, assimilation related to sequences of consonants, omission of /v/ in /əv/ elision for consonant clusters, link of consonants to vowels, use of intrusive /r/ to links vowels, and use of glides to link vowels discovered through analyzing the pre-test, and they were the most conspicuous and prevalent ones The fact that research question was positively answered gave rise to the need for studying the possibility and the extent to which the knowledge of ACS could help alleviate those above-mentioned problems On the course of finding out how much the knowledge of ACS served to improve the students’ oral communication skills, the answer to research question took form (2) The pre- and post-tests’ results revealed statistical evidence about the students’ progress To double-check it, the t-test analysis for the disparity in the mean score of the pre- and post-test was run which produced the Sig value well below the probability level of 05 as reported in the previous chapter This led to an inferential conclusion that the introduction of ACS could make a statistically significant improvement in the students’ performance on oral communication Therefore, the second research question has also been answered The satisfactory outcome realized by successfully answering the two research questions again reinforces the undeniable fact that the subject students have problems in communication due to the lack of ACS knowledge and that under the ACS instruction of the teacher, they can troubleshoot those problems 14 4.2 Recommendations for applying ACS The findings of this study have given the encouragement for the introduction of ACS in high schools 4.2.1 The practitioners of ACS and the teachers of English In order to teach and learn ACS successfully, practitioners should have adequate basic knowledge of English phonetics and phonology However, even low level learners can still benefit from the knowledge of ACS by following the following steps Research students’ interest so that appropriate activities can be employed to encourage them to enjoy learning ACS Multimedia should be used so that learners can have an opportunity to be exposed to authentic and native voices which will little by little help the them develop a feeling for the language Instruct students to self-study to improve their use of ACS “Practice makes perfect” is necessary for English learners, so the teacher needs to encourage them to practice at home through his/her guidance Keep track of students’ improvement, give them incentives, and record their voices to compare with those of native speakers so that they will know what the target to achieve is Assess the teaching method through feedbacks and test results to detect the shortcomings and make any necessary changes so as to have better outcome each year The teaching and learning of ACS will be better with the participation of a large community Therefore, the teacher can collaborate with his/her colleagues in popularizing the programme so that the experience can be shared and the students can have a positive competitive atmosphere to develop 4.2.2 Educational administrators Besides the efforts of the practitioners and the teachers of English, a successful application of ACS needs the support and guidelines from educational administrators Following are some suggestions for them to to realize the hope of creating a generation of students who can communicate effectively in English Firstly, the administrators should consider organizing annual speaking or eloquent competitions in order for the students to have a playground to express themselves, through which the teacher can reflect on his/her work and make timely changes Also, the students’ peers are expected to develop an awareness of learning English not only to take written exams but also to communicate orally Secondly, the administrators can guide the teachers’ more focus on spoken skills and work toward bettering the students’ use of the language which targets the knowledge of the language alone Finally, ACS is a large field and can be studied separately; thus the school administrators can encourage building up individual projects to better help the students acquire ACS through extra-curricular classes 15 4.3 Strategies for teaching ACS 4.3.1 Strategies for teaching rhythm In order to acquire rhythm, students are to be encouraged to blend themselves into the English language environment as much as possible Multimedia will work miracles in the case of lack of real-life exposure to native speakers Listening to English news or music every day or watching English movies helps build a sense of English rhythm which will in turn enormously benefit speaking and listening skills even without the students’ noticing it Some useful activities recommended by Murphy (2012) to help the students learn rhythm are identifying stress, speaking in chorus, tone imitating, shadowtalking, role playing, and games and songs, etc The first thing first in acquiring rhythm is that students can identify the stress in a sentence They should be reminded of the rule of accentuating the content words (words referring to non-linguistic meaning) and gliding over function words (words expressing grammatical relationships) Speaking in chorus has traditionally been used for teaching rhythm, in which a model sentence is prepared by a teacher, and then he/she makes a model of English rhythm by reading the sentence out loud and finally asks students to repeat in chorus Another interesting activity for teaching rhythm is tone imitating The tones of a person’s speech differ a lot according to their moods A newsreader will assume a different rhythm compared with that of someone else An extract from a song or a movie will add color to one’s teaching and motivate one’s students Shadowtalking indicates the act of trying to speak at the same time as the voice in the tape or recording This activity can be done in the classroom or outside the class at home alongside fast speech drills Role playing, games and songs are good for language teaching including teaching rhythm Students play the role of different characters and perform in front of the class This can be effectively carried out through group projects and let the students’ imagination and creativity fly Together with role playing, games bring a lot of fun and life into the rhythm lesson The games stop the bus or bingo can be employed in teaching rhythm For example, the class is divided in to groups and given jumbled sentences in word cards The groups must rearrange the words to make a meaningful sentence then Stop the bus and read the sentence out loud in the tone specified 4.3.2 Strategies for teaching linking Linking is one of the important factors that English learners need to acquire to sound more like a native speaker However, the 10 years teaching English at a high school help the researcher realize that the formal introduction rules for linking sounds in English is crucial because it is simply too hard for the students to learn complex linking rules unconsciously Thus, the preliminary stage of learning linking should be the teacher’s explanation of the rules After introducing the rules of linking, the teacher is supposed to use a variety of activities for drills Listen and repeat, guessing, miming, and noughts and crosses as suggested by Widmayer and Gray (1999) can be used in teaching rhythm creatively 16 Listen and repeat is a simple approach to teaching linking The teacher is advised to add variety to this activity by using the tongue twisters such as: “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper Did Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled pepper? If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper, Where's the peck of pickled pepper Peter Piper picked?” Guessing and miming are beneficial as far as instruction of linking is concerned This activity can be carried out as a game for linking revision The teacher may put the class into teams then he/she read the clues for the students to guess For example: Clue 1: It is a type of car Clue 2: It is not used on normal roads Clue 3: It is used for racing The answer is “formula A”, but one thing should be kept in mind is that the students must use linking in the answer to score a point; thus the winning answer is “formula /r/ A” Employed much in the same manner, miming emphasizes on actions and gestures The teacher can ask a representative of each team to mime the target phrases for the class to guess Noughts and crosses is carried out by drawing the table on the board and two teams are formed to play this game The teacher puts some questions and the team that gives the correct answer will make a move The process is repeated until there is a winner This activity can be time-consuming and requires careful preparation in the teacher’s part because a plethora of questions must be asked before the winner is found 4.3.3 Strategies for teaching assimilation and elision It is recommended by the researcher that assimilation and elision introduction be carried out following the steps for teaching linking, which is to present the rules before having the students practice After the students have been famaliarized with the rules of assimilation and elision, the teacher can march on with some activities to help them practice the points Listen and repeat, guessing, miming, and noughts and crosses which are employed in teaching linking can also be reused for teaching assimilation and elision Besides, the game “Pursuit of words” (simply put here Đuổi hình bắt chữ) can bring laughter into one’s class The game is played by showing students one or two or more pictures which hide in them a word or phrases The students will study the pictures, try to link the ideas, and form a corresponding word or phrase For instance, the two pictures of a face and of a book can be linked to create facebook – a popular social network The teacher should always remind the students of using assimilation or elision in their answers 4.4 Suggestions for further study The researcher would affirm that what he has done in this study on ACS can only be considered as the first step for the further exploration of some other issues related to ACS If possible, research should be done in a longer span of time, with more teacher and student participants from more schools, and include students of different levels so that the 17 findings of the study can be more reliable and persuasive Besides, the techniques and strategies for teaching ACS can be very helpful to teachers and learners all the same Therefore, a research study into this issue will also be of great value Promises I really want to make sure that my thesic is stored during the long period of teaching at Le Hong Phong High school It is not copied by anyone Bim Son, May, 25th, 2019 The author’s full name and signature Administrator’s confirmation Pham Van Tien 18 REFERENCES Avery, P., & Ehrlich, S (1995) Teaching American English pronunciation Oxford: Oxford University Press Brown, G., & Yule, G (1992) Teaching the spoken language Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Case, A (2011) Things to teach about sentence stress and rhythm Retrieved June 21st, 2013 from http://edition.tefl.net/articles/teacher-technique/teach-sentence-stress-rhythm/ Celce-Murcia, M., Briton, D., & Goodwin, J (1996) Teaching pronunciation Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Celce-Murcia, M., & Olshtain, E (2000) Discourse and context in language teaching: A guide for language teachers Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Celce-Murcia, M., Brighton, D M., & Goodwin, J M (1996) Teaching pronunciation: A reference for teachers of English to speakers of other languages Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Cook, A (2000) American accent training: A guide to speaking and pronouncing American English for everyone who speaks English as a second language (2nd ed.) 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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Ur, P (1996) A course in language teaching: Practice and theory Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Widmayer, S., & Gray, H (2010) Tips for pronunciation activities Retrieved June 23rd,2013 from http://www.soundsofenglish.org/tips.htm Wolfram, W., & Johnson, R (1982) Phonological analysis - Focus on American English Washington D.C: The Center for Applied Linguistics Woolard, G (1999) Lessons with laughter Hove: Language Teaching Publication 20 ... bringing parts of the supra-segmental features, i.e ACS, into the teaching of English at high schools in Vietnam in general and at Le Hong Phong High School in particular has never been officially... commensurate recognition both from teachers and students at a high school level Here arises a question about whether it is possible to make the foreign language learning situation at high schools... Strategies for teaching linking Linking is one of the important factors that English learners need to acquire to sound more like a native speaker However, the 10 years teaching English at a high