A study on the pronunciation errors of some english consonants made by grade 10 students at giao thuy high school, nam dinh

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST - GRADUATE STUDIES ************************ NGUYỄN VĂN HÙNG A STUDY ON THE PRONUNCIATION ERRORS OF SOME ENGLISH CONSONANTS MADE BY GRADE 10 STUDENTS AT GIAO THUY HIGH SCHOOL, NAM DINH Nghiên cứu lỗi phát âm vài phụ âm tiếng Anh mà học sinh lớp 10 trường THPT Giao Thủy, Nam Định thường mắc phải M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111 Hanoi - 2016 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST - GRADUATE STUDIES ************************ NGUYỄN VĂN HÙNG A STUDY ON THE PRONUNCIATION ERRORS OF SOME ENGLISH CONSONANTS MADE BY GRADE 10 STUDENTS AT GIAO THUY HIGH SCHOOL, NAM DINH Nghiên cứu lỗi phát âm vài phụ âm tiếng Anh mà học sinh lớp 10 trường THPT Giao Thủy, Nam Định thường mắc phải M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111 Supervisor: Prof Dr Hoàng Văn Vân Hanoi - 2016 CANDIDATE’S STATEMENT I certify that the thesis entitled “a study on the pronunciation errors of some English consonants made by grade 10 students at Giao Thuy High School, Nam Dinh” is entirely my own work for the degree of Master of Arts at University of Languages and International Studies – Vietnam National University, Hanoi I have provided fully documented references to the work of others This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university Hanoi,2016 Nguyễn Văn Hùng i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Prof Dr Hoang Van Van for his valuable guidance and kind encouragement during the development of this study I also wish to express my sincere thanks to a foreign teacher and also my friend: Miss Oliver Violet Katherine Hermione from the United Kingdom who is working at Sydney International English Language Institute in Nam Dinh for her assistance on the recordings and especially for her valuable comments and suggestions in the data collection procedures My thanks are also extended to my students and my colleagues studying and working at Giao Thuy High School for their enthusiastic help and my colleagues there for their encouragement and support Last but not least, I am greatly indebted to my family for the sacrifice they devoted to the fulfillment to this academic work ii ABSTRACT This study aims at identifying the most common errors of grade 10 students at Giao Thuy High School when they pronounce English single consonants The study was conducted by recording the participants’ pronunciation of words and sentences containing the intended sounds The words and the sentences are taken from the textbook Tiếng Anh 10 by Hoang Van Van et al (2006/2015) The students were asked to read the words and the sentences aloud for recording Then with the help from an English native teacher, the recordings were listened and analyzed for errors using articulatory phonetics as the framework for analysis From the results, some pedagogical suggestions are offered to improve the English pronunciation of ten graders at GiaoThuy High School iii CONTENTS PART A: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale Aims of the study Scope of the study Research questions Methods of the study Organization of the study .2 PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 English pronunciation 1.2 Phonetics 1.3 Articulatory phonetics 1.4 English consonants 1.5 Errors and mistakes 11 CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY .15 2.1 The informants of the study 15 2.2 Research method 15 2.2.1 Data collection instrument 15 2.2.2 Data collection procedures 19 CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS .20 3.1 Findings and discussions .20 3.1.1 Findings 20 3.1.2 Discussions………………………………………………………… ……25 3.2 Some possible solutions to those errors .32 PART C: CONCLUSION .37 Summary 37 Pedagogical implication .37 Limitation and suggestion for further research 38 REFERENCES 39 iv LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURE Figure: The speech organs of articulators Table 1: Consonants in English Table 2: Consonants classified according to place of articulation Table 3: Consonants classified according to manner of articulation Table 4: Students’ pronunciation errors on 24 single consonants Table 5: Error percentage on each consonant sound Table 6: Errors in pronouncing consonant /θ/ Table 7: Errors in pronouncing consonant /ð/ Table 8: Errors in pronouncing consonant /ʤ/ Table 9: Errors in pronouncing consonant /t/ Table 10: Errors in pronouncing consonant /ʃ/ Table 11: Errors in pronouncing consonant /f/ Table 12: Errors in pronouncing consonant /tʃ/ Table 13: Errors in pronouncing consonant /s/ Table 14: Errors in pronouncing consonant /d/ Table 15: Errors in pronouncing consonant /p/ Table 16: Errors in pronouncing consonant /ʒ/ Table 17: Errors in pronouncing consonant /l/ v PART A: INTRODUCTION Rationale Nowadays English has become an international means of communication, an important and compulsory subject in high schools in Vietnam However, teaching English in my hometown still faces a number of difficulties, especially, how to improve pronunciation for students is a big question for teachers in my school Although many foreigners have commented “many Vietnamese can speak English, but only a few of them have intelligible English pronunciation.” In other words, their communication in English is not always successful due to their poor pronunciation or mispronunciation Of all causes, pronunciation errors of English consonants can be considered the most common to Vietnamese students At present I am teaching English to students in a high school in Nam Dinh province I realize that they frequently make errors when they pronounce English sounds, especially English consonants It is, therefore, very necessary to identify and help students correct those errors as soon as possible With the hope that this study will contribute to improving students’ pronunciation of English consonants, I decided to conduct the study “a study on the pronunciation errors of some English consonants made by grade 10 students at Giao Thuy High School, Nam Dinh” Aims of the study The aims of the study are: - to identify the most common pronunciation errors of consonants made by ten graders at Giao Thuy High School - to offer some solutions to help students improve their pronunciation of English consonants Scope of the study During the process of acquiring English, students often come up against a number of problems in pronunciation such as consonants, vowels, stress, intonation, rhythm, linking, elision, and so on However, in this minor thesis I just focus on identifying the most common errors of single consonants that students at Giao Thuy High School, Nam Dinh frequently make Based on the findings, some solutions are suggested to improve my students’ pronunciation Research questions Question 1: What are the most common pronunciation errors of consonants made by ten graders at Giao Thuy Upper Secondary School? Question 2: What are possible solutions to those errors? Methods of the study and research instrument  In order to fulfil the aims as set above, the study uses two main methods: - Quantitative method: to find out the most common pronunciation errors - Error analysis: to analyze the errors collected and to give some possible solutions to those errors  Since the study attempts to find out pronunciation errors of English consonants that students at Giao Thuy High School, Nam Dinh often make, recording the participants’ pronunciations of prepared scripts is considered the main research instrument in this study Organization of the study This study is structured into three main parts: INTRODUCTION, DEVELOPMENT, and CONCLUSION PART A: INTRODUCTION – states the reasons of choosing the topic of the study, the aims, research questions, the scope, the methods and the organization of the study PART B: DEVELOPMENT – consists of two chapters Chapter – LITERATURE REVIEW – presents the theoretical background of the research and introduces some basic concepts of phonetics, articulatory phonetics, consonants and pronunciation errors that are relevant to the research Chapter – METHODOLOY – states the methods employed in the study, research questions, data collection instrument and research procedures, methodology used for data collection, and description of the participants Chapter – FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS – presents and discusses the findings obtained from the data analysed PART C: CONCLUSION – provides a summary of the major findings of the study; points out the limitations of the study; and make some suggestions for further studies speaker has to fulfill those three features of sound In addition, two sound /f/ & /v/ share the same place and articulation of manner which are labiodental fricative sounds What makes both sounds different is the state of the vocal cords; /v/ is voiced sound, while /f/ is voiceless sound Example: Sentence: Words: Word laugh photograph Table 12: Errors in pronouncing consonant /f/ The next pronunciation error was /tʃ/, the percentage: 7.2% Basically /tʃ/ can be described through three features, which are the state of the vocal cords, the place of articulation, and the manner of articulation Students tended to replace / tʃ/ with “ch” in Vietnamese as in cheese, chair, reach, catch In English /tʃ/ is a voiceless palatal affricate sound while “ch” in Vietnamese is produced by the contact of the blade of the tongue against the front part of hard palate, voiceless and aspirated To make it easy to pronounce, students changed sound / tʃ/ into “ch” in their mother tongue Errors also happened when this sound was in the final position In this case, the sound might disappear or be deviated into /s/ Example: Sentence: 27 Words: Word children watch watch Table 13: Error in pronouncing consonant /tʃ/ Another error in the recording data students made was /s/ which accounted for 7.1% In English sound /s/ is categorized as voiceless alveolar fricative, this sound also can be found in Vietnamese phonetic system Since this sound can be found in the both languages, my students should find it too difficult to pronounce this sound Yet, still there are some errors made by the students The error in pronouncing sound /s/ mostly occurred when its position was in the final as suffix They tended to omit sound /s/ when it appeared as suffix mentioning plural noun and grammatical ending This error might happen because most of my students were not aware about plural nouns and grammar yet Example: Sentence: Words: Word piece sister stops 28 The next error that was made by grade 10 students was the voiced alveolar plosive - /d/, the percentage was 6.9% In the recording data, the students tended to substitute this sound /d/ for sound /t/ when it was in the final position For instance when they pronounced the word mud, they had the tendency to pronounce it as /mʌt/ instead of /mʌd/ Another error that was made my students in pronouncing sound /d/ was that they tried to omit it when it appeared as consonant cluster in the final position For instance the word find should be pronounced as /faɪnd/ yet they tried to pronounce it with /faɪn/ by omitting sound /d/ Example: Sentence: Words: Word stayed provide find Table 15: Errors in pronouncing consonant /d/ Another common error made by students at Giao Thuy Upper Secondary School was the voiceless bilabial plosive-/p/ which took up 6.8% The error occurred in any position of word The reason of this error is because both [b] and [p] have the same place and manner of articulation The distinction of those sounds is only the state of the vocal cord, /b/ is voiced sound while /p/ is a voiceless sound, and also because of the influence of their mother tongue, Vietnamese which does not have sound /b/ in the final position As in pen /pen/, pet /pet/, jump /dʒʌmp/ could be mispronounced as /ben/, /bet/, /dʒʌm/ The /p/ sound is made by putting 29 your lips together and creating a puff or explosion of air The /p/ sound is called a plosive, meaning that the sound is made by completely stopping the flow of air out of your mouth and then suddenly letting it out with an explosion of air Examples: Sentence: Words: Word provide jump Table 16: Errors in pronouncing consonant /p/ Last but not least, students made errors on consonant / ʒ/- voiced palatealveolar fricative, the percentage was 6.4% To produce this sound, the front of the tongue touches the part between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate The air is constricted, causing friction when passing through the organs of speech This sound is produced with the vibration of the vocal cords As in television /'televiʒn/, measure /'meʒə/, beige /beiʒ/, garage / 'gærɑ:ʒ/ In English /ʒ/ does not occur as an initial sound In the recording data, students confused this sound with sound /dʒ/ and /z/ They made this error because of the absence of this sound in mother tongue Examples: Sentence: A massage can be a good measure to help you relax /ə ˈmæsɑːʒ kən bi ə ɡʊd ˈmeʒə tə help ju rɪˈlæks/ 30 Word television measure garage Table 17: Errors in pronouncing consonant /ʒ/ The last common error made by the students was the voiced alveolar lateral sound-/l/, the percentage was 5.4% The students made this error when the consonant /l/ was in initial and final position of the word They pronounced sound /l/ into /n/ which made it impossible for listeners to understand or get confused This error might be due to the influence of the dialect (local people cannot distinguish the differences between these two sounds) Another error with this sound was the omission when it was in the final position as in skull /ˈskʌl/ or Michael /ˈmaɪkl/ was pronounced as /skʌ/ and /ˈmaɪkə/ Sentence: Words: Word lunch skull Table 18: Errors in pronouncing consonant /l/ Basing on the collected data from recordings of students’ pronunciation, the researcher found out the answer to the first research question The most common pronunciation errors of consonants made by ten graders at Giao Thuy Upper Secondary School are /θ/-/ð/-/dʒ/- /t/-/ʃ/- /f/-/tʃ/-/s/-/d/-/p/-/ʒ/-/l/ 31 Beside twelve common consonants the researcher mentioned, students also made errors on some other consonants such as /b/, /z/, /k/, /v/ or /j/ With a view to improving students’ pronunciation, the researcher would like to suggest some following possible solutions for the teachers 3.2 Some possible solutions to those errors In accordance with the above findings, the followings will be some suggestions for English pronunciation teaching for Upper Secondary School teachers of English There are many useful steps that we are suggested to follow First of all, a brief sound articulation description should be given to the learners Then we should provide our students with some exercises from easy and simple to more and more complicated and difficult ones The techniques that we can employ to teach consonant sounds are minimal pairs, information gap activities, using tongue twisters, matching exercises, missing words, sounds bingo, sounds discrimination exercise, listen and repeat These various techniques can help students improve their learning consonants as well as other individual sounds, and at the same time, they can motivate learning atmosphere The followings are the detail description of some techniques: Technique 1: Minimal pairs: (T Bowen, and J Marks, 1992) This activity is very suitable to monolingual classes It can be used to make contrasts between English and students’ mother tongue The procedure of this technique is, first, to put up on the board a list of minimal pairs The first column is Vietnamese sounds; the second one is English ones with similar pronunciations The teacher will read out the list, but just choose only one word from one pair either in English or in Vietnamese, and ask students to identify which choice the teacher has made in each case by shouting out the language “Vietnamese” or “ English” You can also use this technique to contrast two similar sounds in English 32 Minimal pairs are pairs of words that have one phonemic change between them For example: "let" and "lit", “leave” and “live” are minimal pairs Using these pairs to help students recognize the minor differences between English muted vowel sounds can greatly help not only pronunciation skills, but also comprehension To this, teacher introduces the idea of "minimal pairs" by writing a list on the board of a number of minimal pairs Teacher reads one word in a minimal pair, and then asks students to recognize the word by saying “first” or “second” For example: if the aim is to teach the two sounds /p/ and /b/, the minimal pairs can be: If the aim is to teach the two contrast sounds “f’ and “v”, the words included in the minimal pairs can be: Then teacher reads out one word in a minimal pair, asking students to recognize the word With this technique, teachers can have students practise sounds that can cause confusion because of similar pronunciation This can be used to contrast two similar sounds of which both are in English or to contrast the two similar sounds of which one is English, the other is Vietnamese In the second case, to contrast a 33 Vietnamese sound and an English sound that have nearly similar pronunciation, we call the technique “bilingual minimal pairs” Technique 2: Using tongue twisters This is an excellent way of teaching pronunciation Tongue twisters allow students to practice the language without fear of making mistakes and improve fluency in language Many tongue twisters contain similar sounding words with different meanings, and not always make sense but students will try to say them and learning about these sounds more quickly Students will feel very funny when using tongue twisters For example, we give students some sentences containing sounds then ask them to read aloud them Sounds /s/ and /ʃ/ /dʒ / and / t∫/ /z/ /h/ Technique 3: Matching exercises: (P Avery and S Erhlich, 1992) Another way in teaching English consonants is by giving students matching exercises The teacher can divide the class into two groups, group A has a written description of several people, and group B has a picture containing all of the people of which there are descriptions The object of this activity is to match the written description with the appropriate people For example, if we want our students to practise the two sounds /b/ and /p/, we have some pictures with suggested names: Beckham and Peter Students might describe the pictures as followings: Beckham is playing football Beckham is playing in the park In attempting to match the descriptions with the appropriate person, the students gain practice by producing the relevant sounds A variation on this activity has these 34 descriptors generated by the students themselves Creating such descriptors, especially in groups, provide additional communicative practice of the consonants Technique 4: Missing words: (A Doff, 1988) Another very simple way to teach consonants is using missing words Using this technique, the teacher says some short and simple sentences in which there is one missing word, then the teacher can ask students to say a word to fill in each gap For example, if we want to teach the sound “g”, we can have our students fill the gaps such as: A boy and a (girl) This is a of wine (glass) They give each other at Christmas (gifts) The antonym of “bad” is (good) The Brazil won a _ medal for winning in the final (golden) Technique 5: Sounds bingo: (T Bowen, and J Marks, 1992) This technique is suggested to help the beginner level students to recognize sounds with spelling First of all, the teacher provides learners with a copy of Sounds Bingo worksheet and tells them that he is going to randomly pronounce sounds from the phonemic chart (e.g number /e/; number /m/) If the students hear a sound which is on the card, they should write the corresponding number next to the sound The winner is the first one to number correctly all the sounds in their card Technique 6: Sounds discrimination exercise: (T Bowen, and J Marks, 1992) This activity can help to sensitize learners to minimal differences between individual phonemes and enable them to recognize them in context To this, the teacher firstly gives each learner a copy of the worksheet and tells them that he is going to read contrasting sounds or words aloud to the class and that they must decide which sound is being uttered each time and indicate this by ticking the appropriate column next to the number To some extent, this technique has some similarities with the minimal pair technique Technique 7: Listen and repeat: This technique has been commonly used by most teachers in teaching pronunciation and shown some effectiveness The activities are often arranged from easy to difficult ones: 35 - Listen and repeat individual words containing consonant clusters - Listen and repeat the phrases containing consonant clusters - Listen and repeat conversation containing consonant clusters In short, there are many ways of teaching English consonants; the above are just some main ones They are very useful in teaching consonants in a very communicative way Although there are many other techniques to teach English pronunciation, I just recommend some above because they are suitable for the English level of Giao Thuy Upper Secondary School students These techniques are easy to construct and also interesting enough to motivate students to learn With the techniques described above, we should choose ones in accordance with our students’ learning style and strategies There are many other techniques but because of limited time and space, I just give some effective and suitable ones as reference 36 PART C: CONCLUSION Summary When learning a foreign language, making errors is inevitable because “to err is human” In this research, I used recording of students’ pronunciation as the instrument to collect data for the research It can be concluded from the findings that consonant sounds /θ/- /ð/- /dʒ/- /t/- /ʃ/- /f/- /tʃ/- /s/- /d/- /p/- /ʒ/ - /l/ are the most common errors made by most students at Giao Thuy Upper Secondary School Some practical suggestions to overcome these errors are made in the study They are minimal pairs, information gap activities, using tongue twisters, matching exercises, missing words, sounds bingo, sounds discrimination exercise, listen and repeat In general, learning a foreign language is a long term process which requires a lot of learners’ effort to be successful and to have a good pronunciation Both teachers and students should be aware of its importance and try to discover effective innovated methods to overcome the difficulties and acquire the knowledge Pedagogical implications Teaching a foreign language is a hard job Therefore, there is a great deal of requirements for the teachers Especially, pronunciation is one of difficult aspects in English because of difference between systems of sounds in English and Vietnamese As this study is concerned with school students’ errors in English consonant pronunciation, it can be a useful reference for school teachers in two respects Firstly, this study can be used as supporting material providing the basic knowledge of the pronunciation, the role of pronunciation in language teaching as well as factors affecting pronunciation learning Secondly, the results of the study about students’ common errors in pronouncing English consonants, the causes of these errors as well as some possible solutions offered to improving the situation can help school teachers to understand more deeply about Vietnamese learners’ 37 English pronunciation so that they can find out the way to help their students pronounce English sounds correctly Limitations and suggestions for further research 3.1 Limitations of the study Although much effort has been put to fulfill this study, there still remain some inevitable shortcomings The first is the narrow scope of the study Due to the limited time, the researcher only has focused on the most common mistakes made by 15 students a particular upper high school when pronouncing English consonants in two highly structured environments: words and sentences taken from Tiếng Anh 10 The conclusions, therefore, are suggestive rather than conclusive Secondly, the suggested solutions are based only on the opinions of the researcher and some teachers It would be more appropriate if a bigger research size on this matter could be conducted 3.2 Suggestions for further research Later researchers who have the same interest of the research field can benefit from the current study with recommendation for further research In terms of scope, future research will explore other fields of pronunciation like vowels, stress, and intonation Students’ problems of these aspects could be identified and then handled with different techniques, which will provide a comprehensive picture of correcting learners’ pronunciation problems In addition, it is hoped that further research would be conducted to verify the practical effect of some proposed solutions given 38 REFERENCES Roach, P (1983) English Phonetics and Phonology Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Baker, A (1981) Ship or Sheep? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Corder, S P (1981) Error Analysis and Interlanguage, Oxford: Oxford University Press Burns, A (1999), Quantitative and Qualitative Collaborative Action Research for English Language Teachers Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Crowrther J (1995) Oxford Advanced Learner’s dictionary of current English Oxford: Oxford University Press Watkins, M A (2009) Common Errors of Vietnamese Speakers of English Retrieved September 22, 2011 Davenport, M and Hannahs, S J (1998) Introducing phonetics and phonology, Great Britain: Arnold Hà Cẩm Tâm, Common pronunciation problems of Vietnamese learners of English Journal of Science – Foreign Languages, T.XX1, No.1, 2005 Đoàn Thiện Thuật (1957) Ngữ âm tiếng Việt Hanoi: Hanoi National University Publisher Dulay, H C., & Burt, M K (1974a) “You can’t learn without goofing”, In Rechards, J C (ed.), Error Analysis, London, Longman: 95-123 Norrish, J (1991) Language Learners and Their Errors, Modern English Publications Cambridge: Cambridge Uinversity Press Rechards, J C (1974) Error Analysis: Perspectives on Second Langage Acquisition, Longman Cambridge University Press Dương Thu Thảo (2014) an investigation on common errors in pronouncing English consonants made by to 10 year old students at Linkinworld English Skills, Unpublished MA thesis ULIS Đào Thị Mỹ Hạnh (2007) On the pronunciation of six English consonants /Τ, ∆, Σ, Ζ, τΣ, δΖ/ at Haiphong Medical University Unpublished MA thesis ULIS 39 Tran Thanh Phuc (2006) An action research on the use of continuous feedback to improve the first year students’ English pronunciation at the English Department, College of Foreign Language, Vietnam National University, Hanoi Unpublished MA Thesis, ULIS 40 ... students? ?? pronunciation of English consonants, I decided to conduct the study ? ?a study on the pronunciation errors of some English consonants made by grade 10 students at Giao Thuy High School, Nam Dinh? ??... on the pronunciation errors of some English consonants made by grade 10 students at Giao Thuy High School, Nam Dinh? ?? is entirely my own work for the degree of Master of Arts at University of Languages... alveo-palatal, the place of articulation is partially palatal and partially alveolar The tongue is in contact with an area slightly further back than that for /s/ and the air escapes through a passage