Cải thiện phát âm cho học sinh lớp 10 bằng việc sử dụng kí hiệu phiên âm nghiên cứu hành động tại một trường trung học phổ thông ở hải dương​

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES PHƢƠNG THỊ THẢO IMPROVING PRONUNCIATION FOR GRADE-10 STUDENTS BY USING PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION: AN ACTION RESEARCH PROJECT IN A HIGH SCHOOL IN HAI DUONG (Cải thiện phát âm cho học sinh lớp 10 việc sử dụng kí hiệu phiên âm: Nghiên cứu hành động trường trung học phổ thông Hải Dương) M.A MINOR PROGRAM THESIS Field: Teaching English Methodology Code: 8140231.01 Hanoi - 2019 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES PHƢƠNG THỊ THẢO IMPROVING PRONUNCIATION FOR GRADE 10 STUDENTS BY USING PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION: AN ACTION RESEARCH PROJECT IN A HIGH SCHOOL IN HAI DUONG (Cải thiện phát âm cho học sinh lớp 10 việc sử dụng kí hiệu phiên âm: Nghiên cứu hành động trường trung học phổ thông Hải Dương) M.A MINOR PROGRAM THESIS Field: Teaching English Methodology Code: 8140231.01 Supervisor: Hoang Thi Xuan Hoa, PhD Hanoi - 2019 DECLARATION I hereby declare that this research report is my own unaided work It is being submitted for the Master Degree of English Language Teaching, University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi It has not been submitted to any other degree or examination at any other university i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the following people for their contribution to this study Dr.Hoang Thi Xuan Hoa, my research supervisor, for her valuable guidance, commitment and support Ms Duong Thi Loan and Ms Nguyen Thu Thao, for their support and care, which helped me through many difficulties My parents and my two beloved sisters for a great source of inspiration and encouragement which help me to achieve my goals throughout my years of study The teacher and the students participating in my study, for their time, assistance and enthusiasm ii ABSTRACT This action research aims to improve the pronunciation of vowel sounds for high school students by using phonetic transcription In order to achieve the aim, the study identified the mistakes in vowel sounds made by the students through pre-test and pre-questionnaire and then implemented a plan to help the students improve such mistakes using phonetic transcription Finally, the study evaluated the improvement of the students after applying the technique by employing post- tests, questionnaire and teacher‘s journal The findings of the study revealed that the students made a certain progress in pronouncing vowel sounds after learning with phonetic transcription They also showed a positive attitude towards the use of phonetic transcription in pronunciation learning and wished to receive further training using this technique Keywords: phonetic transcription, vowel sounds, high school students, action research iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION LIST OF FIGURES CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Rationale of the study Research aim Research questions Scope of the study Methods of the study Design of the thesis CHAPTER LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Pronunciation 2.1.1 Definition of pronunciation 1.1.2 Definition of vowel sounds 2.2 Phonetic transcription 2.2.1 Definition of phonetic transcription 2.2.2 The benefits of phonetic transciption in pronunciation learning 2.3 Teaching pronunciation 2.3.1 The aim of teaching pronunciation 2.3.2 Techniques in teaching pronunciation 2.3.3 The difficulties in pronouncing vowels and using phonetic transcription of the students 2.4 Related studies CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 3.1 Research design 3.2 The subjects of the study 3.3 Data collection instruments 3.3.1 Pre-test and post-test iv 3.3.2 Pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire 22 3.3.3 Teacher‘s journal 23 3.4 Data collection and analysis 23 CHAPTER FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 25 4.1 The mistakes and difficulties of students in pronouncing vowel sounds 25 4.2 The improvements of students after learning with phonetic transcription 32 4.3 The opinions of the students after learning with phonetic transcription 36 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 40 5.1 A summary of the major findings 40 5.2 Implications of the study 41 5.3 Limitations of the study 41 5.4 Recommendations for further study 42 REFERENCES 43 APPENDICES I v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1:Table lists of English vowels ( Kelly, 2000) Figure 2: Sound Foundations (Under Hill, 1994) Figure 3: The percentage of students making mistakes in each vowel sound in the pre-test 26 Figure 4: The difficulties of the students in pronouncing vowel sounds and phonetic transcription 28 Figure 5: Reasons for the students‘ difficulties in pronunciation 30 Figure 6: The comparision between the results in the pre-test and post-test 33 Figure 7: Students‘ opinion about their improvements after learning with phonetic transcription 36 Figure 8: Students‘opinions about learning with phonetic transcription .37 vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION This chapter presents the rationale of the study including the theoretical and practical basis for the study, current teaching situation and reasons for applying phonetic transcription into teaching pronunciation in this action research Besides, the chapter also includes the research aim, research questions, scope of the study, methods of the study as well as the design of the thesis Rationale of the study Teaching and learning English for the communication purpose has become a trend and an indispensable necessity in education since English plays a more and more significant role as a means of global integration Pronunciation has been an integral part in learning a language, as Derwing and Munro (2005) assert that ―Having a good pronunciation of the language can help in normal communication, particularly intelligibility‖ Learners with good pronunciation in English are more likely to be understood even if they make errors in other areas (Adult Migrant English Program Research Centre, 2002) Kelly (2000) also states that pronunciation is the key to speaking and adds that the consistency in mispronouncing phonemes can be extremely difficult for other speakers from another language to understand This can be very frustrating for learners who may have a good command of grammar and lexis but have difficulty in understanding and being understood by native speakers It is estimated that the majority of the breakdowns in communication in English is due to pronunciation problems (Jenkins, 2000) In the history of English teaching and learning, the practice has gradually shifted from grammar- translation approach to communicative approach whose ultimate goal is to develop students‘ productive skills In other words, it aims to helping students use the language to communicate rather than acquiring pure language knowledge To be more specific, students are required to take part in more and more activities relating to productive features such as presentation, discussions and debates rather than just dealing with grammar and vocabulary drills as before In addition, students have to take speaking tests besides paper tests at the end of each semester Obviously, speaking skills in general and pronunciation skills in particular play a more crucial role in assessments This circumstance requires more efforts and attentions of both teachers and learners towards pronunciation skills in teaching and learning During the teaching practice at my current education institution, I have observed and noticed that pronunciation is one of the weakest skills of the students in compared to reading, listening skills and other language competent like grammar or vocabulary One of the most obvious mistakes by my students is that they often mispronounced English vowel sounds To be more specific, they either misrecognized one vowel sound for another, especially the ones which are pronounced They are assumed to be caused by one of the following reasons First, English‘s feature is an unphonetic language which presents in the inconsistency in the relationship between spellings and sounds in English That causes a huge confusion for learners whose mother tongue does not bear that feature Second, there are some similarities between two vowel systems – English and Vietnamese Therefore, the Vietnamese learners often carry alternatives to the closet pure vowel in pronouncing pure vowels in English in many cases (Honey,1987) This obviously causes mistakes since most of the English vowel sounds are virtually different from their Vietnamese counterparts A minor difference in length of vowel or tongue, lip positions can lead to the change of a vowel sound into another, the change in the meaning of words and consequently, miscommunication occurring In order to help the students improve their pronunciation, I intended to apply phonetic transcription into teaching pronunciation for the students This technique has been long used in pronunciation teaching and learning that may help to students avoid mistakes in their pronunciation In phonetic transcription, each symbol stands for one sound and one only In other words, the phonetic transcription is symbolized as a bridge between the spellings and the sounds that help students overcome any Handouts and supplementary materials Exercise 1: Practice pronouncing the sound /ə/ in these following words ‗Peter ‗Letter ‗Other ‗Neither ‗Skier ‗Whisper ‗Chancer ‗Sister Potter Exercise 2: Practice pronouncing the sound /ɜː/ in these following words Stir Exercise 3: Identify the sound /ə/ in the following sentences by underlining it and writing down the phonetic symbol /ə/ under those spellings Her mother opened the letter that was addressed to her father The bananas were peculiar colour but Debra ate them anyway Her new dietician was stricter than she expected and though she wasn‘t supposed to eat after seven, hunger got the better of her Exercise 4: Identify the sound /ɜː/ in the following sentences by underlining itand writing down the phonetic symbol /ɜː/ under those spellings She urged him to curse less as she yearned for a perfect and virtuous partner The circus clowns wore purple shirts and juggled thirty burning balls, making the front row of the audience very nervous She turned up early to her first day of work to be certain of the perfect first impression Have you ever heard the saying ―the early bird catches the worm?‖ XVII Appendix Teacher’s journal Session 1,2,3: /ə/ /ɜ:/ /i:/ /i/ Date: 12/3 Time: 135 minutes First I wrote down some words that contained the targeted sounds on the board (feet, fee, heat, hit,…), and asked students to pronounce them It seemed that the students could not recognize the targeted sounds /i:/ or /i/ in those words and pronounce the sound /i/ all them same The same mistakes happened with the pair /ə/ and /ɜ:/ They all pronounced the words ― first, prefer, further‖ with the sound more like ―ơ‖ in Vietnamese When the teacher acknowledged them that there were two sounds a long vowel /i:/ and a short vowel /i/, as well as a long vowel /ɜ:/ and a schwa /ə/ in English, many students appeared like they knew it for the first time The teacher showed students a model video of these sounds and asked the students to listen and watch carefully, then imitate They caught on it quite quickly, especially with the pair /i:/ and /i/ Things seemed to be more challenging with the pair /ə/ and /ɜ:/ It took longer time for students to make the sound /ɜ:/ than the other sounds It maybe because this sound is strikingly different from sounds in their mother tongue – Vietnamese The teacher then provided the students with exercises to practice The students could pronounce these targeted sounds properly as long as they were provided with phonetic symbols When it came to produce step which meant students had to identify the targeted sounds themselves, it was obviously hard for many students to get it corrected Clearly, it took a lot of time for the students to practice and get used to these sounds gradually before they could independently pronounce them correctly without the help of phonetic symbols Session 4, ,6: /e/, /æ/, /ʌ/, /a:/ Date: 19/3 Time: 135 minutes - The sounds /ʌ/ seemed to be more familiar to them and easier to imitate than the two others - The sound /a:/ was more challenging since it was quite different from Vietnamese vowel sounds After some time to practice the sounds, many students still mispronounced the sound /a:/ into the sound of letter ―ô‖ in Vietnamese - Among these four sounds, the sound /æ / seemed to make students confused XVIII most Some of them pronounced it like the sound /e/ while the others pronounced them like /a/ However, when I told them that it was actually the combination of two sounds and provided them with examples, they seemed to understand better However, some of them still could not make distinction between them I should send them the video to listen again at home and practice themselves - They also could not identify the vowel /e/ and /æ/, such as in ―bed‖ and ―bad‖ The confusion between /e/ and /æ/ may be considered as the most serious problem that Vietnamese speakers in general and the students in the current class in particular encounter when they learn to speak English vowels - The sound /e/ was an easy sound for the students to learn in terms of pronunciation but it was also a challenging one since many of the students mistook this sound into /i/ Session 7, 8, 9: /ɔ/, /ɔ:/, /ʊ/, /u:/ Date: 26/3 Time: 135 minutes - Well, it seemed that these sounds were quite familiar to the students since they could immediately recognize these sounds when they were introduced - Similar issue concerned with the sound /u:/ and /ʊ/ There are many words with ‗oo' that may be pronounced as either /u:/ or /ʊ/ This can produce confusion for Vietnamese learners; as a result, the students projected the same sound for both /u:/ and /ʊ/ For example, the word ‗good' is pronounced as /gud/ For the most part, my students vocally could not distinguish the differences between them However, the quality of pronouncing these sounds needed to be improved and they needed to notice the differences between these sounds and similar /u/ in Vietnamese - The pair /ɔ/ and /ɔ:/ seemed not to be too unfamiliar to the students However, the distinction between those two were not always easy The students could show some extent of distinction between two sounds with the help of phonetic transcription when they practiced Even when words were not provided with phonetic symbols, the students still somehow got them corrected That may be because the spelling patterns of these two sounds were quite predictable - Compared to monophthongs, diphthongs seemed to be much easier for them to learn The students said that they were quite similar to some Vietnamese XIX diphthongs such as /aʊ/ ~ ao; /oʊ/ ~ âu; /ʊə/ ~ ua - However, I had to remind them that there were not totally the same Because the diphthongs are basically the combination of two monophthongs, so it was like pronouncing two single monophthongs but in a continuous and rather fast manner And these diphthongs needed to be pronounced both sounds and kept longer in compared to Vietnamese diphthongs - The only problem remained was if they could notice when to pronounce these sounds in words or mispronounced them into other ones Session 13, 14, 15: Revision Date: 9/4 Time: 135 minutes - After four lessons, the teacher helped the students to review all 20 vowel sounds in English They were shown a full chart of 20 vowel sounds and asked to pronounce them all Among them, the most difficult ones were /a:/ / ɔ: / /3:/ /u:/ - long monophthongs and some short monophthongs like /æ / - The teacher wanted to check if the students remembered the phonetic symbols of those sounds as well as if they were able to pronounce these sounds probably Some students performed better than the others in the sense that they could pronounce them quite accurately, so the teachers asked them to be tutor and helped other weaker students to practice - Then the students were provided with exercises to practice all the sounds individually and in groups It seemed that students could pronounce all the sounds quite well with the help of phonetic transcription Session 16, 17, 18: Revision Date: 16/4 Time: 135 minutes - When the teacher provided exercises mixed of all twenty sounds for students to practice, some of them performed quite well Other students seemed to recall quite well the symbols and their sounds They could pronounce words properly by looking at the phonetic symbols However, when it came to recognizing the sounds themselves, the students had more difficulties in getting them corrected Many of them, about one third, mispronounced unfamiliar words without phonetic transcription provided It seemed that it might take more time for the students to get used to the sounds and its common patterns before they could nail the pronunciation of vowel sounds without the help of phonetic transcription XX Students‘ number: Exercise 1: Read out loud these following words Words 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Sweep Expensive Food Cookery Anger Preference Hard Another Earth Suppose Support Pot Allowance Promotion Labour Bride Employ Fare Tourist Meal XXI Exercise 2: Read out loud these following sentences My sister and I take turns laying the table for meals, sweeping the house and feeding the cat /fiːdɪŋ/ It can help you lose weight, build healthy bones and also prevent diseases ( ―âu‖ – 1)/luːz/ /weɪt/ / bɪld/ like cancer /ˈkænsə/ (1-/e/) The food most commonly causing peanuts, shellfish /ˈpiːnʌts/ (1- ―u‖) Result Sounds /iː/ /ɑː/ /ʌ/ /ɜː/ 10 /ə/ ( * Note: These above words and sentences were extracted from English 10 Textbook – The second semester – New Curriculum – Vietnam Education Publishing House and Pearson Cooperation) XXII Students‘ number: 09 POST-TEST Exercise 1: Read out loud these following words Words Achieve Honey moon Widespread 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 System Fullness Planning Charge Cover Confirm Suggest Force Hottest Browse Raincoat Engage Sightseeing Destroy Compare Tournament Career XXIII Exercise 2: Read out loud these following sentences Language translation software allows you to translate from one language into /læŋgwɪʤ/ /sɒftweər/ /əˈlaʊz/ /trænsˈleɪt/ (1- ―ê‖) another /əˈnʌðə/ (1- ―ơ‖) They are excellent learning tools, too You can store information, take / / notes, /nəʊts/ Choose a device that suits your learning style, which will make learning English easier, faster, more effective and more enjoyable /ɪˈfɛktɪv/ /ɪnˈʤɔɪəbl/ /iːzɪə/ /ˈfɑːstə/ Result Sounds /uː/ /ʊ/ /æ/ /ɑː/ /ʌ/ /ɜː/ 10 /ə/ ( * Note: These above words and sentences were extracted from English 10 Textbook – The second semester – New Curriculum – Vietnam Education Publishing House and Pearson Cooperation) XXIV /ɛksələnt /ˈ/ (1- ―ô‖) Appendix 11 The result of the pre-test Sounds /iː/ /ɪ/ /uː/ /ʊ/ /æ/ /e/ /ɑː/ /ʌ/ /ɜː/ /ə/ /ɔː/ /ɒ/ /aʊ/ /əʊ/ /eɪ/ /aɪ/ /ɔɪ/ /eə/ /ʊə/ /ɪə/ XXV Appendix 12 The result of the post-test Sounds /iː/ /ɪ/ /uː/ /ʊ/ /æ/ /e/ /ɑː/ /ʌ/ /ɜː/ /ə/ /ɔː/ /ɒ/ /aʊ/ /əʊ/ /eɪ/ /aɪ/ /ɔɪ/ /eə/ /ʊə/ /ɪə/ XXVI Appendix 13 Comparison of the result between the pre-test and the post-test Sounds /iː/ /ɪ/ /uː/ /ʊ/ /æ/ /e/ /ɑː/ /ʌ/ /ɜː/ /ə/ /ɔː/ /ɒ/ /aʊ/ /əʊ/ /eɪ/ /aɪ/ /ɔɪ/ /eə/ /ʊə/ /ɪə/ Average XXVII ... GRADE 10 STUDENTS BY USING PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION: AN ACTION RESEARCH PROJECT IN A HIGH SCHOOL IN HAI DUONG (Cải thiện phát âm cho học sinh lớp 10 việc sử dụng kí hiệu phiên âm: Nghiên cứu hành động. .. thiện phát âm cho học sinh lớp 10 việc sử dụng kí hiệu phiên âm: Nghiên cứu hành động trường trung học phổ thông Hải Dương) M.A MINOR PROGRAM THESIS Field: Teaching English Methodology Code: 8140231.01... study The research was planned to conduct over 39 grade -10 students (17 males and 23 females) in a class at a highschool in Hai Duong The school was located on Pha Lai ward, Chi Linh district,