An investigation into Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation

An investigation into Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation

Chapter I: Introduction

1.1 Rationale:

Nowadays, the development of science, technology and economy and the tendency ofglobalization have brought about a great demand of intercommunicating In order to meetthis demand, English has become an international language and a very important andcompulsory subjects at schools As a result, teaching English has become a compulsorysubject at schools for many years And nowadays, it has become more important becausein the past, students had to learn English, but they did not have to take English exams inSecondary School Graduation exams However nowadays, students have to take them Intraditional teaching, students were required to acquire English grammar nowadays they arerequired to acquired various skills and language items including English grammar, Englishvocabulary and English pronunciation In the light of Communicative Language Teaching(CLT), students are required not only to have good knowledge of vocabulary and eligiblegrammar, the four language skills but also correct pronunciation Accurate pronunciation isa must in English learning for students Therefore, learning English pronunciation is ofgreat importance to students, even for their exams In addition, this will help them to havea good job in their future and enable them to communicate with foreigners successfully ifthey have a chance and the need.

Despite realizing this importance, Vietnamese students still can not acquire correctEnglish pronunciation The main reason is that the traditional teaching laid the emphasis ongrammar has led to this problem Many students can not pronounce English words andsentences correctly They often pronounce them with equal stress, flat intonation and norhythm at all English pronunciation seems has become the most serious problem thatstudents meet when they learn English This is happening at almost upper secondaryschools in Vietnam except for foreign language specializing schools.

Situated in a mountainous area in Huong Khe district, Ha Tinh province, PhucTrach Upper Secondary School is far weaker than other schools in terms of learningdifferent school subjects, of which English language teaching seems to be the worst And ifsome students are said to be good at English, it means they are good at English grammar.Most of them find it hard to express themselves orally If anyone can, he has problems inpronouncing English words and sentences In the English lessons, only teachers speak , and

most of the time, teachers have to speak Vietnamese because they are afraid that theirstudents do not understand what they are speaking When we apply the new textbook,almost students complain about difficulties they get in learning English speaking skill ingeneral and in pronunciation in particular And we ourselves realize that our students reallyhave bad pronunciation As a result, students here have a lot of problems when they do thetests on pronunciation as a part the graduate examinations This is a serious problem notonly at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School but also at many other mountainous schools.So, investigating the problems and then find out some suggestions to improve the situationare very helpful for teaching and learning English at our school In addition, no research onteaching English pronunciation at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School has been done sofar.

Because of these above reasons, I decided to do research on Phuc Trach UpperSecondary students’difficulties in learning English pronunciation entitled: “Aninvestigation into Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School students’ difficulties in learningEnglish pronunciation” The study was conducted to seek the answers to the question ofwhat difficulties Phuc Trach upper secondary students meet when they learn Englishpronunciation.

1 2.The aims:

With the above rationale, my study was conducted with these following main aims:-To investigate the difficulties that Phuc Trach Upper Secondary students meetwhen they learn English pronunciation.

-To recommend some suggestions for teachers and learners to overcome thesedifficulties.

To gain these aims, some main objectives were defined as followings:

- To find out students’ attitude towards learning English in general and learningEnglish pronunciation in particular.

- To investigate how difficult the English pronunciation learning towards thestudents is?

- To find out what the difficulties are.

- To offer some recommendations.1.3 The research questions:

With the aims stated above, I proposed two following questions for the study:a What are their main difficulties in learning English pronunciation?

b What are the causes of these difficulties?1.4 Research Methodology:

The study was conducted as a case study

The research began with a literature review in different theoretical issues related toteaching English pronunciation After the literature review, to gain the aims with highreliability, the researcher employed different methods of a case study They areobservation, questionnaires and interviews These methods were used to collect data fromstudents and teachers at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School in Ha Tinh with the intentionof addressing the aims of the study.

+ Classroom observation was employed to see what the main English pronunciationproblems were I observed five different lessons which were given by four teachersselected randomly including three speaking lessons and two Language focus ones Eachof these teachers presented an English lesson in a 45 minute period Classroom observationwas also used to observe students’ attitude towards English pronunciation.

+ Questionnaire instrument was designed to investigate students’ attitude towardslearning English as well as English pronunciation and their main difficulties There wereten questions in the questionnaire, the first three questions were aimed at finding outstudents’ attitude towards learning English speaking in general and towards learningEnglish pronunciation in particular The seven questions left were employed to find outwhether they had difficulties in learning English pronunciation or not and what difficultieswere as experienced by the students All the questions in the questionnaire involved closedand open-ended questions with the intention of getting deep and reliable data Aftercollecting the data from the questionnaires, I analyzed the data qualitatively andquantitatively

+ The last method – interviewing teachers at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School was toget deeper and clearer insights into students’ difficulties in learning pronunciation Thisstep was to support the first and second instruments, questionnaires and classroomobservation, to get and analyze the data reliably

1.5 The scope of the study.

As I mentioned in the research methodology, this is a case study So the study wasjust conducted on a focused group of grade 11th students in Phuc Trach Upper SecondarySchool This study was aimed at exploring Phuc Trach Upper Secondary students’difficulties in learning English pronunciation and giving some suggestedrecommendations.

1.6 The setting and background.

Located in a remote area in Huong Khe district, Ha Tinh province, Phuc TrachUpper Secondary School is a young school compared with the four others in this districtwith 7 years of foundation Therefore, the school has a lot of weaknesses and difficulties.The school was founded in 2000, so most of the teachers are very young and lack ofteaching experience Furthermore, the students there mostly come from poor families.They do not have good conditions to study Because of these above reasons, Phuc TrachUpper Secondary School is somewhat weaker than other schools And as a certain, theirlearning English is really bad Although English has been compulsory for many years,students there have not paid much attention to it If some students at this school invest timeto study the subject, it is just because of the exams they have to take Many students failthe national examination for the Secondary School Diploma because they can not doEnglish tests well Due to this, students there tend to concentrate on English subject moreand more However, because of many factors, especially the objectives of the test, Englishteaching and learning in this area focus much on grammar, not other skills That is whypronunciation seems to be very difficult for most of the students Teachers there tend toignore teaching pronunciation to the students Moreover, classes at this school are large,crowded and poorly equipped which make speaking lessons more difficult Because of this,students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School are weak at speaking English, and theyoften have wrong pronunciation Traditionally, teachers did not pay much attention toteaching pronunciation And the old English textbooks did not involve teaching

pronunciation, either When we teach our students with the new textbooks, most of themare unwilling to have pronunciation lessons in Language Focus part, because they find ithard to achieve as good and correct pronunciation as in the CD For the teachers andstudents at this school, pronunciation is a great problem

1.7 The design of the study

The thesis was designed with five chapters.

The first chapter, the Introduction is an brief overview of the study with moredetails of the rationale, the aims, the methods, the setting and background as well as thedesign of the study.

Chapter Two is a literature review This chapter presents the theoretical backgroundof the thesis which contains six main points: place of pronunciation in oral communicationand foreign language learning, preliminary considerations in teaching pronunciation,

pronunciation teaching methodologies, compare and contrast sound systems in the two

languages: English and Vietnamese, some common pronunciation problems, and commonpronunciation problems that Vietnamese often meet.

Chapter Three deals with the research methodology In this chapter, the focus will beon background information of the subject of the study, the instruments used to collect dataand the procedure of data collection as well.

The next chapter, chapter Four, presents a description of data analysis anddicussions With the description of data analysis through three instruments: questionnaire,classroom observation and the interview, I explored some interpretations of the findings.

The last chapter, the conclusion, is devoted to the summary of the findings andsome pedagogical suggested recommendations to help teachers and students in uppersecondary schools to overcome difficulties in learning and teaching English pronunciation.This chapter also provides the limitations of the study as well as some recommendationsfor further study.

Following these five chapters are the Appendixes and References of the study.

Chapter II: Literature Review

2.1.Place of pronunciation in oral communication and foreign languagelearning.

In oral communication, if a person mispronounces a sound, a stress, a word orwrongly uses the rhythm, intonation of his utterances, he will surely causemisunderstanding, even no understanding for his partner, and he will get failure incommunication Moreover, if the pronunciation of that person of the same language incommunication is different from that of his partner, they will also get difficulties inrecognizing and understanding each other To have success in communicating with others,it is recommended that you have good pronunciation in general and good foreign languagepronunciation in particular Therefore, achieving good pronunciation is very important forforeign language students It really decides the success or failure of one’s oralcommunication in the target language.

Pronunciation is as important as any other aspects of language like syntax orvocabulary Correct pronunciation is very necessary to develop our speaking skill.Pronunciation also has many other connections to the other fields such as listening,spelling and even grammar For example, if someone is good at pronunciation, he will beable to comprehend the spoken English more easily Or if a person understands and usesthe rhythm, intonation and stress correctly, he will make the listeners understand better.Even pronunciation has connection to grammar, especially in English The speaker whopronounces correctly the endings of the words, for example, can give grammaticalinformation.

In short, pronunciation is not only important in our oral communication but also inother skills such as grammar, listening and spelling So, acquiring good pronunciation isvery important for those who are learning foreign languages It can help them much in theirexams and their futures Students who will have to look for jobs in their future should alsorealize this importance and try to learn English pronunciation as much as possible.

2.2.Preliminiry considerations in teaching pronunciation

There are a number of factors affecting the acquisition of the sound system of asecond language The dominant ones may be biological, social-cultural, personality and

linguistic factors The followings are a brief consideration on these factors.

2.2.1 Biological factor

A common observation made by many people involved in the field of secondlanguage learning is that adult second language learners often have a foreign accent whilechild second language learners often attain native-like pronunciation “Critical-periodhypothesis”, one hypothesis explaining this difference between adults and children holdsthat languages are learnt differently by children and adults, and that is a direct result of thematuration of the brain As many experienced teachers of foreign languages know, most ofadult learners have difficulties in acquiring native-like pronunciation So in some aspects,the critical period hypothesis is true However, it does not mean that no adult can achievenative-like pronunciation In fact, some adults do very well in learning pronunciation andamong other adult learners, the degree of pronunciation accuracy varies considerably fromone to another Therefore, the critical period hypothesis do not absolve English SecondLanguage teachers of the responsibility of teaching pronunciation The fact that adultlearners can achieve pronunciation differently also means that teachers of foreignlanguages should spend much time improving students’ pronunciation.

2.2.2.Socio-cultural factors

The fact that variability in pronunciation accuracy of adult learners exists has ledother researchers to conclude that it is socio-cultural factors that mostly determine thesuccess of learning pronunciation These researchers has also claimed that the morestrongly second language learner’s identity with members of the second language culture,the more likely they are to sound like members of that culture Because of this, it is veryimportant for teachers of foreign languages to be aware of the way in which these socio-cultural factors can influence the students Maybe the students also wish to have goodpronunciation but at the same time they may not want to sound the foreign language in thenative accent So it is very important to set the realistic goal in the pronunciation class.

2.2.3.Personality factors.

The personality of the learner also affects the acquisition of pronunciation Forlearners who are out-going, confident, and willing to take risks, they may have moreopportunities to practise pronunciation In contrast, students who are less confident,

introverted and unwilling to take risks may lack of opportunities to do so Teachers offoreign languages should be aware of this so that they can encourage students to overcomethese difficulties in learning pronunciation To do so, teachers have to strive to create anon-threatening atmosphere in the classroom so that students are willing and encouraged topractise Furthermore, pressure is not effective if students are not ready That is whyteachers are advised not to force students so much

In personality factor, there are two very important issues The first one is phoneticability It is demonstrated by some researchers that some people are able to mimic thesounds more accurately than others This factor can not be determined by the teachersbecause each one is born with different ability of mimicing the sounds The things teachersof languages can do with this factor is to investigate learners’ abilities so that they can havesuitable tasks and methods to improve their pronunciation Secondly, learners’ attitudestowards learning pronunciation is also very important in personality factor If studentshave positive attitude towards learning English and they have great motivation to learn it,they will try their best which can improve their learning than anything else.

2.2.4.The role of the native language

Mother tongue is also another important factor According to Peter Avery andSusan Ehrlich(1992), the native language can determine the nature of a foreign accent Wecan see this clearly from the fact that speakers of English are easy to recognize Vietnameseaccents, Chinese accents, Japanese accents, etc In other words, learners can transfer thesound patterns of the native language into the second language Every language hasdifferent inventory of sounds, different rules for combining these sounds into words, anddifferent stress and intonation patterns Learners make errors in pronunciation not justwhen they attempt to produce unfamiliar sounds but also when they reflect the soundinventory, rules of combination and the stress and intonation patterns of the nativelanguage.

Peter Avery and Susan Ehrlich(1992) stated that the sound system of the nativelanguage influence students’ pronunciation of English in at least three ways First of all,learners may have difficulties when they meet sounds in English that are not part of thesound inventory of the learners’ native language According to these two linguists, thepronunciation of sounds depends on the proper use of the musculature in the mouth That

is why adult learners are difficult to produce new sounds because they have neverexercised their mouths in the particular way required to produce certain English sounds.The second way that the sound system of the native language influences students’pronunciation of English is because the rules for combining sounds into words are differentin the learner’s native language Learners may meet this type of difficulty when they learna particular sound that is part of the inventory of both English and the native language.Thirdly, learners can transfer the patterns of stress and intonation, which determine theoverall rhythm and melody of a language from the native language into the secondlanguage.

What Peter Avery and Susan Ehrlich(1992) mentioned here is that the role of thenative language is very important to the second language pronunciation learning becausethe native language not only affects the ability to produce English sounds but also theability to hear English sounds.

It is proved that the more differences between the two languages there are, the moredifficulty the students have to cope with pronunciation.

In short, there are some preliminary considerations in teaching pronunciation Thatis biological factor, socio-cultural factors, personality factors, the role of the nativelanguage Teachers of foreign languages should be aware of these factors when teachingpronunciation.

2.3 Pronunciation teaching methodologies.

In the last half of the twentieth century, language teaching methodology haschanged in approaches and methods of pronunciation teaching There has been differentviews on teaching pronunciation The following is a brief description of how pronunciationwas taught in some of the most popular language teaching In the 1970s, when the non-directive approaches stayed at the first place, teaching pronunciation was somewhatincidental Once again, the Traditional Grammar Translation method paid little or noattention to pronunciation Pronunciation was considered not important at all As a result,at that age, learners became “deaf and dumb” in the target language Students of foreignlanguages in those days seemed to have no ability to produce correct pronunciation.However, current approaches to teaching pronunciation contrast widely with the earlyones Since the oral approach to language teaching appeared, there has been a tendency to

pay attention to pronunciation teaching to develop oral skills Many methods requirelearners to achieve native-like pronunciation The Audio-lingual is an example However,despite the great time and effort made to achieve this goal, the results were oftendissatisfied In the light of communicative language teaching( CLT), learners are expectedto achieve intelligible pronunciation of the target language This trend has received greatacceptance in all over the world.

So what is meant by “intelligible pronunciation”?

According to Kenworthy, J ( 1987 ), intelligibility is understood by a listener at agiven time in a given situation That is, students are able to understand, accept and declareto be recognized meaningfully in oral communication

In other words, in the light of CLT, the target of teaching pronunciation is to helpstudents to be able to do well and meaningfully in their oral communication.

In short, trends of teaching pronunciation have been changed much Nowadays,teaching pronunciation plays a very important part in language teaching It is the maintarget connected with other skills to get the right purpose of teaching foreign languages,that is communication.

2.4 Compare and contrast sound systems in the two languages: English andVietnamese

For most of Vietnamese learners, learning English pronunciation is of great hard.In teaching pronunciation, mother tongue is a factor that has great influence onacquiring any foreign languages And acquiring a foreign sound system is always of greathard to the learners According to Nunan (1991), the problems of acquiring the phonologyof the second language presents formidable challenge to any theory of second languageacquisition Mother tongue can influence learners’ acquisition of foreign languages insome ways such as transference and interference Transference means that the similaritiesbetween the phonetic and phonemic systems of the first and the second languages canfacilitate the acquisition of pronunciation, and interference means that the differencesbetween the two languages can hinder the process of pronunciation acquisition That iswhy learners of foreign languages can have a lot of difficulties in learning pronunciation.So, to investigate the difficulties that students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School often

meet, firstly, a contrastive analysis on the similarities and differences between the twolanguages, English and Vietnamese, should be conducted By doing this, we can see themain problems that students often meet when learning English pronunciation more easily.Analyzing the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese sound systemscan make us examine the difficulties more easily and can help the process of teachingEnglish pronunciation The contrastive analysis will be on five different categories.

The most clear difference between the two language sound systems may be thatVietnamese is basically monosyllabic language, whereas English is a multi-syllabiclanguage Because of this difference, students often have difficulties when learning Englishpronunciation, especially when they have to cope with stress, breath control and derivativewords in English The first problem that Vietnamese students meet because of the abovedifference is stress Vietnamese learners are familiar with the monosyllabic language, so itis very difficult for them to remember a long word with more than one syllable InVietnamese, the monosyllable nature means Vietnamese words have no stress So it iseven more difficult for them to join the syllables in a multi-syllable word together and puta stress to any English words Further more, word stress in English has no orthographicindication, so it is very difficult for students to learn by heart That is why stress is acommon mistake for Vietnamese students As a result, Vietnamese learners need to getfamiliar with the concept of word stress, which is rather different from the concept of tonesin Vietnamese In Vietnamese, tones are always phonemic, while in English, stressplacement can be phonemic but not always This difference also makes students difficult tolearn English pronunciation Moreover, English stress placements can be changed by theaddition of the prefixes and suffixes or with different vocabulary items So, stress seems tobe of great challenge to Vietnamese students Another matter that the monosyllable natureof Vietnamese language causes is that Vietnamese students are not familiar with thecharacteristic of weaken vowels, which is conjunction with unstressed syllables It meansthat stressed syllables in English is spoken with more effort and energy meanwhile theunstressed ones are spoken with less effort and the vowels in unstressed syllables areweakened This characteristic does not exist in Vietnamese So Vietnamese students oftenproduce all English syllables with an even tone And it is very difficult for them toremember that they have to reduce the vowels in unstressed syllables into schwa

In short, the difference of monosyllabic and multi-syllabic natures between the twolanguages causes a lot of difficulty to learners when they acquire the Englishpronunciation

Secondly, in English, the breath has to be used more strongly than in Vietnameseand syllables as well as words are linked together via close juncture The articulation of thefinal boundaries of words and syllables is often stronger In contrast, Vietnamese words arespoken with weakened breath out flow at the final boundary with distinct separationbetween words Because of this difference, Vietnamese students often make mistakes whenthey speak English They often speak English words and syllables seperatedly So whenthey listen to the native English speakers, it is very difficult for them to understand becausethese native English speakers often link the last consonant of the words to the followingword which begins with a vowel Within a word, linking word is a great problem forVietnamese students because their mother tongue does not have this characteristic.

In addition, Vietnamese language also has a simpler structure of a syllable

Doan Thien Thuat, a Vietnamese linguist, also concludes that a Vietnamese wordoften has three or less than three phonemes Because of this, consonant clusters do notexist in Vietnamese whereas in English, clusters do exist a lot And in English, consonantclusters can appear at the initial or final positions, a word can begin with one , two or threeconsonants (e.g cat, they, string, etc.) and ends with one, two, three or four consonants( e.g bad, wish, miss, attempt, etc ) This also makes Vietnamese learners difficult toacquire the foreign language However, for Vietnamese students, final consonant clustersseem to be more difficult for them to pronounce and they often obmit one or two finalconsonants The problem will be in more details in the following parts.

Vietnamese often pay little attention to intonation Doan Thien Thuat explained thatthey do not pay much attention to intonation because a tone language often has verylimited intonation In fact, it has intonation, but the role of intonation is very vague.Instead, Vietnamese often add some particles to change the meaning of a sentence, forexample, they can use the particles h¶, hö, ¸, ¹, etc to make a question, or some particlessuch as «i, èi, ¸, qu¸, thËt, lµm sao, etc to make an exclamative sentence It means thatVietnamese change different kinds of sentences with lexical items, not with intonation.

However, these particles are often pronounced with higher or stronger voice, which meansthat intonation also plays a little role in making different kinds of sentences On the otherhand, in English, intonation plays a very important role in changing the meaning of asentence With different intonation, the meaning of an utterance can change differently

For example:

A: When are you leaving :

B: Tonight ( with a falling tune) A: Tonight? ( with a rising tune )

Because of this characteristic of intonation in English, Vietnamese students oftenget a lot of difficulty in getting the right messages of the speakers when they speakEnglish They are now aware of the role of intonation in English, so utterences are oftenproduced incorrectly, when they need to give a falling tune, they may give a rising one orwhen they need to give a rising tune, they give a falling one That is why intonation can beseen a serious problem for Vietnamese students when they learn English.

Fouthly, The sound systems between the two languages also differs greatly First ofall, there are many consonants and vowels that occur in English but do not occur inVietnamese and some others occur in Vietnamese but do not exist in English In English,there are 24 consonants, 20 vowels ( including 8 diphthongs) meanwhile in Vietnameseonly 23 consonants, 13 vowels and 3 diphthongs exist This difference makes studentsdifficult to acquire the English sound system

Firstly, we will examine the difference of the vowel systems between the twolanguages In Vietnamese , there are only 13 vowels and 3 diphthongs meanwhile inEnglish there are 20 vowels including 7 short vowels, 5 long vowels and 8 diphthongs Themost clear difference between the two vowel systems is that in Vietnamese, no long vowelexists That is why Vietnamese students are not familiar with the concept of long vowelsand they often produce a short vowel instead of a long vowel Further more, inVietnamese, diphthongs are not rarely followed by a last consonant but in English, they arecommon So when our students meet a cluster that includes a diphthong and ended by avowel, it is very difficult for them to produce the whole word, instead, they often omit thefinal consonant For example, they may pronounce the word “might” into “migh” with no

“t” at the end of the word

The second matter that we will examine is the difference of consonants between thetwo sound systems It is clear that there are a lot of differences in the comparison ofconsonants as well as that of vowels According to Roach, P (1983), English has twenty-four consonants They are: p, b, m, f, v, t, d, k, g, θ, δ, s, z, l, z, h, n, ŋ, r, j, w, t∫, dʒ, ∫.Theclassification of these consonants is based on the manner of articulation and place ofarticulation Vietnamese is different from English It has twenty-two initial consonantspointed out by Doan Thien Thuat (initial consonants are ones which stand at the beginning ofa syllable) They are : b, m, f, v, t’, t, d, n, s, z , l, ţ, ş, z, , c, …k, ŋ, x, γ, p, h Theclassification of them is also based on the two criteria above but it is more particular andpeculiar Comparing the two consonant systems, we can see that, firstly, there are someEnglish consonants which do not exist in Vietnamese language such as t∫, dʒ, θ, ð, j, w…That these symbols do not exist in Vietnamese is a great difficulty for them to acquire Theyare not familiar with these ones, so it is very difficult for them to produce the correct soundsof these consonants Besides, learners have a confusion of similar sounds: /b/ and /p/, /dʒ/and /ð/…and have difficulty in pronouncing consonant clusters such as /desks/, /fifθ/

The fifth difference that can cause pronunciation problems related to grammarwhich do not occur in Vietnamese That is ‘s-ending’ in plural nouns, the third singularpersonal verbs (Simple Present tense) and “ed-ending’ in regular past verbs and regularpast participles Vietnamese learners often pronounce ‘s-ending’ as /s/ and ‘ed-ending’ as /ɪd/ but in fact English is different and is not always pronounced like that The main reasonfor this is that in Vietnamese, there is no concept of the voiced consonants and voicelessconsonants If teachers provide learners with some main classifications of consonantsincluding the state of the vocal cords (voiced and voiceless), learners can avoid wrongpronunciation in this case For example, they can know when they pronounce ‘s-ending’ as/s/, /z/, /ɪz/ and ‘ed-ending’ as /ɪd/, /t/, /d/ for phonetic words ending in voiced, voicelessor some specific sounds….In addition, Vietnamese learners have a confusion of the formof the indefinite article: ‘a/an’ and the way to pronounce definite article: ‘the’ They knowthat ‘a’ stands before a consonant and ‘an’ before a vowel but sometimes they can’texplain some problems such as a university, an M.P, an hour…and they still makemistakes Teachers need explain to them that consonants and vowels here are phonetic

words but not letters (ju:nɪvəsə ti/, /mpɪ/ and / aʊə/ ) and the rule for a/an does not change.

‘The’ is pronounced as /ðə/ when it stands before a consonant and as /ðɪ/ before a vowel.Nevertheless, Vietnamese learners can not distinguish this without realizing Englishphonetic symbols, specially consonants Consequently, teachers should pay attention to themissing knowledge of consonants of learners in order to instruct them in time.

Moreover, in Vietnamese, an individual alphabet represents only sound,meanwhile in English, one alphabet can represent different sounds The followings aresome examples:

- car /ka:/

- romantic /rǝʊmæntɪk/- day /dei/

- a lternative /ɔ:ltɜ:nǝtɪv/

In English, the alphabet “a” can be pronounced in many different ways such as/a:/, /æ/, /ei/ , /ǝ/ and /ɔ:/, or the letter “u” can be pronounced into /ʊ/, /ju:/, /e/ (bury), /ʌ/,etc.

In short, there are many differences between the two language sound systems thatcan cause difficulties to Vietnamese learners when they learn English The comparisongives clearer cut reasons why our learners often make mistakes when they learn Englishpronunciation This is the foundation for me to study students’s main difficulties inacquiring English pronunciation more easily and scientifically

2.5 Some common pronunciation problems.

Doff, A.(1988:113) pointed out that students in different countries have differentproblems with English pronunciation However, there are some common pronunciationproblems that learners often make when they speak English According to him, there aresome main categories of common problems that are likely to occur as followings:

- Difficulties in pronouncing sounds which do not exist in the students’ ownlanguage For example, the consonant /ð/ is of great hard for Vietnamese students ofEnglish because this sound does not exist in Vietnamese language

- Confusion of similar sounds, e.g /ɪ/ and /i:/.

- Difficulty in pronouncing consonant clusters.

- Tendency to give all syllables equal stress and “flat” intonation.

This is because learners usually have difficulties with a set of sounds that sharearticulatory features rather than with isolated sounds.

2.5.1.Common problems with English vowels.

According to Avery, P and Ehrlich, S.(1992), English Second language studentsoften have problems in producing vowel distinctions The reason for this is because thereare more vowels in English than in other languages As we can see an example in 4.1.4 thatin English there are 20 vowels including 7 short vowels, 5 long vowels and 8 diphthongsmeanwhile in Vietnamese there are only 13 vowels and 3 diphthongs, or even fewer, inJapanese, there are only five vowels That is why students in many other countries oftenmeet a lot of difficulties in learning English vowels The followings are some commonvowel problems.

Problem 1: Tense vs lax vowels/i:/ vs /I/ as in “beat” and “bit”/ei/ vs /e/ as in “bait” and “bet”/u:/ vs /ʊ / as in “boot” and “book”.

Students often make great confusion between these tense and lax vowel pairs Problem 2:

/e/ vs /æ/ as in “bed” and “ bad”/Λ/ vs /a/ as in “cut” and “car”.

Students often make great confusion of these above pairs of vowels Some learnersproduce the pairs of vowel sounds with the same manner which can cause a lot ofmisunderstanding

The above are some common vowel mistakes that students in the world often makewhen they acquire English pronunciation

2.5.2 Common mistakes with English consonants.

We will consider common consonant problems first For the most part, we often seecommon consonant problems according to particular articulatory features because learnersoften have difficulties with a set of sounds that share articulatory features rather than withisolated sounds.

The followings are some main problems and some tips for teachers to help theirlearners overcome these difficulties

Problem 1: Aspiration: /p/, /t/, and /k/.

Students fail to aspirate the voiceless stops /p/, /t/, and /k/ at the beginning of aword Therefore, “plot”, “tot” and “cot” may sound like “blot”, “dot” and “got”

Problem 2: Voicing of fricatives:

/v/ as in “vote”

/ð/ as in “this” or “ then’/z/ as in “zoo” or “rose”

/dʒ/ as in “ beige” or “measure”

Many students are unable to distinguish voiced and voiceless fricatives Mostcommonly, they will be able to produce voiceless fricatives but not voiced ones Forexample, /f/ may be substituted for /v/ so that a word such as “leave” is pronounced as“leaf” Similarly, /s/ may be substituted for /z/, so that a word such as “peas” is pronouncedas “peace”

Problem 3: Voicing of final stop consonants /b/, /d/, and /g/

Many English second language students will not voice final stops, but willsubstitute a voiceless stop for a voiced one Thus, “cub” may sound like “cup” It is moredifficult to demonstrate the voiced and voiceless distinction with stops than with fricativesbecause stops can not be prolonged.

However, final voicing does affect the pronunciation of preceding vowels Theyare longer before voiced consonants than before voiceless consonants This fact is helpfulin teaching final voiced consonants

If the students are having difficulties in voicing final stops, they will probably have

difficulties with final voiced fricatives also

Problem 4 : Initial consonant clusters:

Many students have problems when they have to produce some initial consonantclusters Some initial clusters such as clusters beginning with stops /p/,/t/,/k/,/b/,/d/,/g/,followed by /l/ or /r/ are of great difficulty for them For example, it is very hard for themto produce the correct clusters such as “ preparation”, “draw”, “glue”

Problem 5 : Final consonant clusters.

Final consonant clusters are also problems for students in some countries when theyacquire English sound system Some complicated final consonant clusters such as / kt/ in“worked”, /st/ in “missed”, /ld/ in “filled” are very difficult for students to produce Thesegrammatical ending clusters can cause many grammatical misinterpretation problems.

Problem 6: /θ/ and /ð/ as in “think” and “ this”.

Students in most part of the world often have problems with this consonant couple.In each native language, students will choose other consonants to substitute the twodifficult consonants They may substitute /t/, /s/, or /f/ for /θ/

2.5.3.Stress, rhythm and intonation problems

Although stress, rhythm and intonation are issues for higher level students, they arevery important to increase the comprehensibility of the learners’ speech However,students in most parts of the world often meet difficultties with these issues

The first problem is stress A stressed syllable is one that is given more strength,length , loudness and prominence than the other syllables In contrast, unstressed syllablesreceive shorter, unclearer and weaker voice However, in many other languages, stressdoes not exist That is why students of many other countries find it difficult to master theacoustic properties of the English stress system

In English, stress can fall on any syllable of word, and there is no orthorgraphicindication to learn about English stress Further more, the place of the stress of a word, asI mentioned above, can be changed when we add prefixes and suffixes which can cause alot of difficulties to the students

According to Avery, P and Ehrlich, S.(1992), rhythm and intonation are alsocommon problems for students in the world when they learn English Further more,intonation plays a very important role in English language With the same lexical items, wecan change the meaning of a sentence with different intonation which do not exist in manylanguages That is why many English second language learners fail to give the correctintonation that can cause misunderstanding to the listeners

In short, in this part, I give a brief comment on common mistakes that Englishsecond language students often meet This involves vowel common mistakes, consonantcommon mistakes, stress, rhythm and intonation problems

Considering the common difficulties that students in the world can make us easierto see common pronunciation problems that Vietnamese students often meet

2.6 Some common pronunciation problems that Vietnamese students oftenmeet when they learn English consonants

As I have mentioned above, because the sound systems of English and Vietnamesediffer greatly, Vietnamese speakers can have some pronunciation problems Vietnamese isa tone language, that is, pitch changes distinguish word meaning Most words inVietnamese consist of only one syllable, there are fewer consonants than in English andthere is no consonant cluster That is why they often meet some main problems whenproducing English as below:

2.6.1 Vowel problems.

Avery, P and Ehrlich, S.(1992) pointed out that while Vietnamese makes manyvowel distinctions, the English lax vowel pairs are still problems to them They often meetdifficulties in distinguishing vowels pairs such as /e/ vs /æ, /Λ/ vs /a/, short “I” vs long/i:/, /ə/vs /ɜ:/, /ɒ/vs /ɔ:/ Vietnamese students often produce the same manner with thesetwo different pairs of vowels This can cause misunderstanding to foreigners.

2.6.2 Consonant problems.

As I mentioned in the previous part, there are many consonants that exist in

English but do not exist in Vietnamese So Vietnamese learners of second English

language often have many problems with the system of English consonants The problemsthat they have with English consonants seem to be many more than the ones that they have

with English vowels The followings are common mistakes that Vietnamese students oftenmeet when they speak English pointed out by Avery, P and Ehrlich, S.(1992).

Problem 1: Word- final voiceless stop consonants :/p/, /t/, and /k/

In Vietnamese, the voiceless stop consonants /p/, /t/, and /k/ occur at the end of aword, but these consonants are never released in final position and is much shorter thantheir English equivalents This means that even when Vietnamese speakers pronouncethese consonants in final position, English speakers may have difficulty hearing them.Thus, a word such as “beat” may sound like “ bee”.

Problem 2: Voiced and voiceless stops in word final position: /b/, /d/, /g/, vs /p/,

/t/, /k/.

As Vietnamese has no voiced stops at the ends of words, Vietnamese speakers needpractise in distinguishing between voiced and voiceless stops in this position For example,words such as “cap” and “cab” may sound identical, with a short unreleased /p/ at the endof both words.

Problem 3 : Word final fricative consonants : /f/, /v/, / θ/, /ð/, /s/,/z/, /ʃ/ and /dʒ/ In Vietnamese, fricatives /f/, /v/, / θ/, /ð/, /s/,/z/, /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ do not occur at the finalposition of a word, but in English, they do That is why Vietnamese students often omitthese fricatives at the ends of the sounds

Problem 4 : / θ/ and /ð/ as in “thank” and “than”

In fact, these two consonants do not occur in Vietnamese In stead, there are twoconsonants in Vietnamese that make them difficult to distinguish with these / θ/ and /ð/,they are “th”(sound like the aspirated “t”) and “d”( sound like the consonant “z” inEnglish In fact, the manner of producing these Vietnamese sounds are different from thetwo / θ/ and /ð/, but their sounds seem a little the same That is why Vietnamese studentsoften substitute a /d/ for /ð/ and a “t” for / θ/.

Problem 5 : Consonant clusters.

In Vietnamese, consonant clusters do not happen at the initial and final position.When they speak English, they have to meet a lot of consonant clusters that contain manyconsonants at the same time This causes a lot of difficulties for them because they are not

familiar with this

As a result, Vietnamese students often delete one or more than one consonant in aconsonant cluster so that it will be easier for them to produce the sound

2.6.3 Stress, rhythm and intonation problems.

As I mentioned in the above part, Vietnamese is basically monosyllabic language,whereas English is a multi-syllabic language And in an English multi-syllabic word, theremust be a stressed syllables which is very different from Vietnamese Therefore,Vietnamese students often have problems with stress in English

Further more, as I mentioned in the 5.1.2 , Vietnamese learners often delete thefinal consonant in a consonant cluster Consequently, they will not link the words together.

Last but not least, intonation is also a problem for Vietnamese students This iscaused because Vietnamese is a tonal language, and intonation plays very little role inchanging the meaning of a sentence Instead, we often use particles to change the meaningof a sentence, from a statement into a question or an exclamative Meanwhile in English,intonation plays a very important role in changing the meaning of a sentence Withdifferent intonation, the meaning of an utterance can change differently Vietnamese arenot familiar with this, so they often pay little attention to intonation, which plays a veryimportant role in English language

In conclusion, this chapter presents a literature review of English pronunciationteaching which includes many related issues such as the importance of Englishpronunciation, the factors that can affect pronunciation acquisition process, thepronunciation teaching methodologies, a contrast between the Vietnamese and Englishsound systems and common problems that students in general and Vietnamese students inparticular often meet This literature review provides me with a better understanding thephenomenon and that can help me do my research more scientifically.

Chapter III: Research methodology

The research methodology was presented briefly in the first chapter, theIntroduction In this chapter, once again, it will be discussed in more details.

3.1 Methodology

3.1.1 The research questions:

The study was designed to seek the answer to the three following questions:

a Do students in Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School have difficulties inlearning English pronunciation?

b What are their main difficulties as perspected by the students?

c What may be the causes of these difficulties?

With these three research questions, the study will investigate secondary schoolstudents’ difficulties as well as the causes of these difficulties in learning Englishpronunciation.

3.1.2.Method orientation.

As stated in the first chapter, to gain the aims with high reliabiity, the researchemployed different methods of a case study That is classroom observation andquestionnaires These methods were used to collect data from students in Phuc TrachUpper Secondary School in Ha Tinh with the intention of addressing the aims of the studyand then anlyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively According to Larsen-Freeman andLong( 1991:14), both qualitative and quantitative paradigms are not competing butcomplementary and the choice between them is not necessary They mentioned that to gainthe aims with high reliabiity, researchers should make a combination of these twoparadigms.

Because the study was designed to investigate the situation in a particular context,that is in Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School, the study was a case study.

3.1.3 The characteristics of a case study

To understand the characteristics of a case study, first of all, some definitions of theterm “case study” should be presented.

As cited in Jaeger, (1988) by an unidentified student , a case study is what you calla case, in case, in case you don’t have anything else to call it”

According to Smith, cited in Stake (1988), the definition of case study isambiguous However, the term “bounded system” defines the method for him

Johnson (1992) defines that a case study is a study which focuses holistically on anentity In other words, a case study is a study which involves a detailed exploration of asingle instance of, or example of, something.

Gillham (2000:1) defines a case as:

 A unit of human activity embedded in the real world Which can only be studied or understood in context.

Which merges in with context so that precise boundaries are difficult to define Thus, a case study has some following characteristics Firstly, The context isn’tnecessarily a cultural context It can be any context as long as the context is relevant to theresearch questions The second characteristic is that it focuses on an individual In otherwords, case studies seek to investigate one single small group of subjects only It isconcerned with the documentation and analysis of a single instance A case study, that is tosay, is one which seeks the different kinds of evidence which there is in only one setting,the case study Another characteristic is that it provides a portrait of what going on in a

setting (as cited in Dr Le Hung Tien’s lecture on case-study research) In other words, the

researcher taking a case study does not start with a priori theoretical notions and in casestudies the continual refining of hypothesis is not reflected Because he can not know whattheories or explanations make the most sense until he gets in there and select the data, getsto understand the context and analyzes the data McDonough & McDonough (1997:212)claim that “ teachers spend their working lives dealing in different ways with individuals,and they need to understand those “cases”, not in the first instance to build theories andsearch for broader patterns, but to understand their learners’ behaviors’ learning styles,language development , success, failures, attitudes, interest and motivation.

The fourth characteristic of a case study is that it can have objective and subjectiveaccounts of data According to McDonough & McDonough (1997:204), the study of casesis not only a qualitative undertaking, nor does it present an either/or perspective inquantitative / qualitative terms Most of case study is quantitative because the weight ofdiscussion on case study is on interpretive approach However, it depends on the size ofscale trend to be qualitative or quantitative or both For example, when the researchersneed to study large scale trends, cases will be usually selected on the basic of randomsampling and the data submitted to stastical analysis A case study is always selectedbecause it deals with a considerably current issue A case study focuses holistically on anentity However, each case selected may be a representative for a general category

Because of these above characteristics, I decided to choose a case study for myresearch The problems at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School may be, to some degree,the same to those of many other mountainous schools in Vietnam Furthermore, the aim ofmy research is to investigate the difficulties that Phuc Trach Upper Secondary studentsmeet when they learn English pronunciation and to recommend some suggestions forteachers and learners to overcome these difficulties The purpose of the study alsostimulates me to choose a case study for my research methods.

3.1.4 The participants:

With the questionnaire and classroom observation instruments, the participants arethe students in two randomly selected classes to be the participants They are both maleand female Among 100 respondents, 59 were female and 41 were male All of them are atgrade 11th who have been learning English for five years I chose these grade 11th studentsto be the participants of the study because, firstly, they have two years of working with thenew textbook meanwhile the 10th grade students have only nearly one year and the 12th

grade ones have no year working with the new textbook which emphasizes much onpronunciation than the old text book So the 11th grade students also have more time todeal with learning pronunciation Further more, the 11th grade students also have more timeto help me get the data meanwhile the 12th ones are busy preparing for the graduationexams.

These 100 students were chosen randomly without no criteria set before With thisrandom selection, I hope to receive the most reliable and honest data from thequestionnaires In the questionnaires, I explained that their answers would be anonymousand my aim at giving them the questionnaires are just to get the data for the researchwithout any other aims.

With the interview instrument, the participants were ten teachers of English at PhucTrach Upper Secondary School Among them, there were seven male teachers and threefemale ones They have been teaching at that school from one to six years.

3.1.5 The instruments.

As I stated in the Introduction part, the research will be carried out by classroomobservation, questionnaires and interviews

The questions and interviews are designed into investigate these main followingcategories:

- General attitude to learning English as well as speaking skill.

- Students’ main difficulties in learning English pronunciation as experienced bythe teachers.

- The main causes of those difficulties.

3.1.5.1 The questionnaires:

As we know, one of the most popular means of collecting data is usingquestionnaires The reason for this is that, firstly, it is easy for us to construct and it doesnot either consume time or cost money Secondly, questionnaires can help us to collectdata in field setting, and the data themselves are more amenable to quantification thendiscursive data such as free-form field-notes, participant observers’ journals or transcriptsof oral language (David Nunan 1992:143) Further more, we can achieve respondentanonymity when applying this type of instrument There are two types of questions, closedand open-ended questions The former kind of questions are often used to get answerswhich are factual or fairly predictable, meanwhile open-ended questions are preferredwhen the researchers expect to get answers which are in terms of opinions, beliefs orjudgments Further more, open-ended questions also give the respondents chances toexpress more opinions individually Because of these above reasons, both two types ofquestionnaires were employed to get the data.

To get the data reliably and avoid problems such as respondents’ shyness, thequestionnaires were started with explaints about its aims as well as its respondentanonymity In order that the students had no pressure of time and freedom, they were let tofinish the questions at home for one day Further more, all the questions were written inVietnamese so that they could be at their best to understand the questions and express theirthoughts and ideas.

With the aims stated in the Introduction part, I handed out the questionnaires to thestudents These questions were aimed at exploring students’ general attitude towardslearning English The followings are the more details about the questionnaires:

- Students’ general attitude towards learning English ( Q1)

- Students’ general attitude towards learning English pronunciation (Q2)- Students’ awareness of the importance of learning English pronunciation(Q3)- Do students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation exist ? and what arethe difficulties? ( Q4)

- What are English vowels that can cause problems to the students? (Q5)- What are English consonants that can cause problems to the students? (Q6)- Are the students aware of the concepts of stress, intonation and rhythm? (Q7)- Do students have difficulties with English stress? (Q8)

- Do students have difficulties with English rhythm?(Q9)- Do students have difficulties with English intonation? (Q10)

After the respondents finished the questions, they handed in the papers to me sothat I could do the data analysis.

Interview, as we know, is a very useful tool to get the data According to Hopkins(cited in McDonough & McDonough ( 1997 :181), there are three applications of interviewin classroom research The first application is to focus on a specific aspect of classroomlife in detail, the second is to get diagnostic information, and the third is to improve theclassroom climate.

Nunan also gives more uses of interview instrument such as needs analysis,program evaluation, individual case studies and mini- surveys.

From these above uses of interview, we can see that with this study, using interviewinstrument is very suitable to be applied The questionnaires were used to investigatestudents’ general attitude towards learning English, English pronunciation and students’difficulties in learning English pronunciation, This second instrument, the interview, wasused to investigate what difficulties students meet when they learn English pronunciation.This kind of instrument, in this case study, had better be applied to the teachers who aremore experienced and better at expressing the problems.

So, ten teachers of English teaching at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School wereselected for a follow- up interview for more details in difficulties that studends often meetwhen learning English pronunciation.

3.1.5.3 Classroom observation:

To suppliment the first and second instrument, the questionnaires and interview, Iemployed classroom observation for more data Certainly, classroom observation is aninstrument that can help researchers bolster the qualitative and quantitative results.Hopkins(1993) described classroom observation as a “pivotal activity” with a crucial roleto play in classroom research, teachers’ personal professional growth, and schooldevelopment as a whole ( as cited in McDonough, J and McDonough, S 1997:101).McDonough, J and McDonough also stated that observation with its associated , So it canhelp me test the validity of the data obtained about students’ attitude towards learningEnglish pronunciation and their difficulties

When observing the class, I did a lot of note taking as well as audio-taping toensure that the information collected was rich and triangulated To make the students feelcomfortable in the lessons, I just sat at the last row and took part in five different lessonsas a non-participant observer to have a naturalistic observation

3.1.6 Data analysis process

The data collected from three different sources, the questionnaires, interview andclassroom observation, were classified into different categories to analyze:

- Students’ general attitude towards learning English

- Students’ realization of learning English pronunciation importance.- Students’ common mistakes when learning English pronunciation All the data were gathered to analyze both descriptively and interpretively.3.2 Conclusion.

In short, this chapter deals with the chosen research methodology, which includessix main points: research questions, method orientation, characteristics of a case study, theparticipants, the instruments and data analysis process.

With the methodology presented, I hope to get the most triangulated and reliable aswell as valid data.

The next chapter will be the data analysis and discussion

Chapter IV: Data analysis and discussions

4.1 Data analysis:

4.1.1 Questionnaires

With the aim at investigating students’ general attitude towards learning Englishand English pronunciation as well as their difficulties when learning Englishpronunciation, all the questionnaires were gathered and analyzed both descriptively andinterpretively The results shown below are rather significant to the research For moredetails, I selected main results to present as following.

4.1.1.1 Students general attitude towards learning English.’ general attitude towards learning English.

In the questionnaires, the first question was made to investigate students’ generalattitudes towards learning English The first question asked the respondents if they likedlearning English or not There were four choices for them After doing some statistics, theresults were summarized as shown in the below table:

Number ofrespondents

Like learning Englishvery much (%)

Like learningEnglish (%)

Do notlike (%)

Neither like nordislike (%)

Table 1: Students’ general attitude towards learning English

Table 1 shows that most of the students here like learning English There were 34respondents who chose the answer “Like learning English very much” and 45 respondentswho chose “Like learning English “ So in total the percentage of the respondents wholiked learning English was 79% meanwhile only a small number (16%) disliked learningEnglish and 5% of the 100 respondents said that they neither liked nor disliked learningEnglish The 79 students who chose the answer “like or like very much learning Englishalso gave more reasons for being interested in the subjects I chose some typical ones andthen translate into English as below:

• I think learning English can help people get a better job with high salary in thefuture.

• Learning English is rather important because it is a compulsory subject when weare students.

• I like learning English because it can bring me many opportunities tocommunicate with foreigners when I study on a big city in the future.

•English, as we all know, is an international language So it is very important for allpeople to acquire it

• Being able to speak English well is very interesting, it can help me sing Englishsongs or watch international programs.

In short, most of the students who chose the first and second answers recognizedthe importance of English Meanwhile, most of the 16 students who disliked learningEnglish explained the main reason for not being interested in the subject is its difficulties.They complained about the irregularities in grammar as well as in pronunciation Thebelow are some interesting expressions:

• I dislike learning English because it is so difficult I can not even know the use ofany tenses.

•English is so different from our mother tongue So most of us find it difficult tospeak English We can’t understand what our teacher says everyday.

•Learning English vocabulary is of great hard to me.