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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 of globalization have brought about a great demand of intercommunicating In order to meet this demand, English has become an international language and a very important and compulsory subjects at schools As a result, teaching English has become a compulsory subject at schools for many years And nowadays, it has become more important because in the past, students had to learn English, but they did not have to take English exams in Secondary School Graduation exams However nowadays, students have to take them In traditional teaching, students were required to acquire English grammar nowadays they are required to acquired various skills and language items including English grammar, English vocabulary and English pronunciation In the light of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), students are required not only to have good knowledge of vocabulary and eligible grammar, the four language skills but also correct pronunciation Accurate pronunciation is a must in English learning for students Therefore, learning English pronunciation is of great importance to students, even for their exams In addition, this will help them to have a good job in their future and enable them to communicate with foreigners successfully if they have a chance and the need Despite realizing this importance, Vietnamese students still can not acquire correct English pronunciation The main reason is that the traditional teaching laid the emphasis on grammar has led to this problem Many students can not pronounce English words and sentences correctly They often pronounce them with equal stress, flat intonation and no rhythm at all English pronunciation seems has become the most serious problem that students meet when they learn English This is happening at almost upper secondary schools in Vietnam except for foreign language specializing schools Situated in a mountainous area in Huong Khe district, Ha Tinh province, Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School is far weaker than other schools in terms of learning different school subjects, of which English language teaching seems to be the worst And if some 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 in pronouncing 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 their students not understand what they are speaking When we apply the new textbook, almost students complain about difficulties they get in learning English speaking skill in general and in pronunciation in particular And we ourselves realize that our students really have bad pronunciation As a result, students here have a lot of problems when they the tests on pronunciation as a part the graduate examinations This is a serious problem not only 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 situation are very helpful for teaching and learning English at our school In addition, no research on teaching English pronunciation at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School has been done so far Because of these above reasons, I decided to research on Phuc Trach Upper Secondary students’difficulties in learning English pronunciation entitled: “An investigation into Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation” The study was conducted to seek the answers to the question of what difficulties Phuc Trach upper secondary students meet when they learn English pronunciation 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 meet when they learn English pronunciation -To recommend some suggestions for teachers and learners to overcome these difficulties To gain these aims, some main objectives were defined as followings: - To find out students’ attitude towards learning English in general and learning English pronunciation in particular - To investigate how difficult the English pronunciation learning towards the students 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 to teaching English pronunciation After the literature review, to gain the aims with high reliability, the researcher employed different methods of a case study They are observation, questionnaires and interviews These methods were used to collect data from students and teachers at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School in Ha Tinh with the intention of addressing the aims of the study + Classroom observation was employed to see what the main English pronunciation problems were I observed five different lessons which were given by four teachers selected randomly including three speaking lessons and two Language focus ones Each of these teachers presented an English lesson in a 45 minute period Classroom observation was also used to observe students’ attitude towards English pronunciation + Questionnaire instrument was designed to investigate students’ attitude towards learning English as well as English pronunciation and their main difficulties There were ten questions in the questionnaire, the first three questions were aimed at finding out students’ attitude towards learning English speaking in general and towards learning English pronunciation in particular The seven questions left were employed to find out whether they had difficulties in learning English pronunciation or not and what difficulties were as experienced by the students All the questions in the questionnaire involved closed and open-ended questions with the intention of getting deep and reliable data After collecting the data from the questionnaires, I analyzed the data qualitatively and quantitatively + The last method – interviewing teachers at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School was to get deeper and clearer insights into students’ difficulties in learning pronunciation This step was to support the first and second instruments, questionnaires and classroom observation, 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 was just conducted on a focused group of grade 11th students in Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School This study was aimed at exploring Phuc Trach Upper Secondary students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation and giving some suggested recommendations 1.6 The setting and background Located in a remote area in Huong Khe district, Ha Tinh province, Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School is a young school compared with the four others in this district with 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 of teaching experience Furthermore, the students there mostly come from poor families They not have good conditions to study Because of these above reasons, Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School is somewhat weaker than other schools And as a certain, their learning 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 time to study the subject, it is just because of the exams they have to take Many students fail the national examination for the Secondary School Diploma because they can not English tests well Due to this, students there tend to concentrate on English subject more and more However, because of many factors, especially the objectives of the test, English teaching and learning in this area focus much on grammar, not other skills That is why pronunciation seems to be very difficult for most of the students Teachers there tend to ignore 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 they often have wrong pronunciation Traditionally, teachers did not pay much attention to teaching pronunciation And the old English textbooks did not involve teaching pronunciation, either When we teach our students with the new textbooks, most of them are unwilling to have pronunciation lessons in Language Focus part, because they find it hard to achieve as good and correct pronunciation as in the CD For the teachers and students 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 more details of the rationale, the aims, the methods, the setting and background as well as the design of the study Chapter Two is a literature review This chapter presents the theoretical background of the thesis which contains six main points: place of pronunciation in oral communication and 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 common pronunciation problems that Vietnamese often meet Chapter Three deals with the research methodology In this chapter, the focus will be on background information of the subject of the study, the instruments used to collect data and the procedure of data collection as well The next chapter, chapter Four, presents a description of data analysis and dicussions 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 and some pedagogical suggested recommendations to help teachers and students in upper secondary schools to overcome difficulties in learning and teaching English pronunciation This chapter also provides the limitations of the study as well as some recommendations for 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 language learning In oral communication, if a person mispronounces a sound, a stress, a word or wrongly uses the rhythm, intonation of his utterances, he will surely cause misunderstanding, even no understanding for his partner, and he will get failure in communication Moreover, if the pronunciation of that person of the same language in communication is different from that of his partner, they will also get difficulties in recognizing and understanding each other To have success in communicating with others, it is recommended that you have good pronunciation in general and good foreign language pronunciation in particular Therefore, achieving good pronunciation is very important for foreign language students It really decides the success or failure of one’s oral communication in the target language Pronunciation is as important as any other aspects of language like syntax or vocabulary 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 be able to comprehend the spoken English more easily Or if a person understands and uses the rhythm, intonation and stress correctly, he will make the listeners understand better Even pronunciation has connection to grammar, especially in English The speaker who pronounces correctly the endings of the words, for example, can give grammatical information In short, pronunciation is not only important in our oral communication but also in other skills such as grammar, listening and spelling So, acquiring good pronunciation is very important for those who are learning foreign languages It can help them much in their exams and their futures Students who will have to look for jobs in their future should also realize 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 a second 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 second language learning is that adult second language learners often have a foreign accent while child second language learners often attain native-like pronunciation “Critical-period hypothesis”, one hypothesis explaining this difference between adults and children holds that languages are learnt differently by children and adults, and that is a direct result of the maturation of the brain As many experienced teachers of foreign languages know, most of adult 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 achieve nativelike pronunciation In fact, some adults very well in learning pronunciation and among other adult learners, the degree of pronunciation accuracy varies considerably from one to another Therefore, the critical period hypothesis not absolve English Second Language teachers of the responsibility of teaching pronunciation The fact that adult learners can achieve pronunciation differently also means that teachers of foreign languages 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 led other researchers to conclude that it is socio-cultural factors that mostly determine the success of learning pronunciation These researchers has also claimed that the more strongly 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 very important 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 good pronunciation but at the same time they may not want to sound the foreign language in the native 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 For learners who are out-going, confident, and willing to take risks, they may have more opportunities to practise pronunciation In contrast, students who are less confident, introverted and unwilling to take risks may lack of opportunities to so Teachers of foreign languages should be aware of this so that they can encourage students to overcome these difficulties in learning pronunciation To so, teachers have to strive to create a nonthreatening atmosphere in the classroom so that students are willing and encouraged to practise Furthermore, pressure is not effective if students are not ready That is why teachers are advised not to force students so much In personality factor, there are two very important issues The first one is phonetic ability It is demonstrated by some researchers that some people are able to mimic the sounds more accurately than others This factor can not be determined by the teachers because each one is born with different ability of mimicing the sounds The things teachers of languages can with this factor is to investigate learners’ abilities so that they can have suitable tasks and methods to improve their pronunciation Secondly, learners’ attitudes towards learning pronunciation is also very important in personality factor If students have 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 and Susan Ehrlich(1992), the native language can determine the nature of a foreign accent We can see this clearly from the fact that speakers of English are easy to recognize Vietnamese accents, Chinese accents, Japanese accents, etc In other words, learners can transfer the sound patterns of the native language into the second language Every language has different inventory of sounds, different rules for combining these sounds into words, and different stress and intonation patterns Learners make errors in pronunciation not just when they attempt to produce unfamiliar sounds but also when they reflect the sound inventory, rules of combination and the stress and intonation patterns of the native language Peter Avery and Susan Ehrlich(1992) stated that the sound system of the native language 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 the sound inventory of the learners’ native language According to these two linguists, the pronunciation 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 never exercised 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 different in the learner’s native language Learners may meet this type of difficulty when they learn a 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 the overall rhythm and melody of a language from the native language into the second language What Peter Avery and Susan Ehrlich(1992) mentioned here is that the role of the native language is very important to the second language pronunciation learning because the native language not only affects the ability to produce English sounds but also the ability to hear English sounds It is proved that the more differences between the two languages there are, the more difficulty the students have to cope with pronunciation In short, there are some preliminary considerations in teaching pronunciation That is biological factor, socio-cultural factors, personality factors, the role of the native language Teachers of foreign languages should be aware of these factors when teaching pronunciation 2.3 Pronunciation teaching methodologies In the last half of the twentieth century, language teaching methodology has changed in approaches and methods of pronunciation teaching There has been different views on teaching pronunciation The following is a brief description of how pronunciation was 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 somewhat incidental Once again, the Traditional Grammar Translation method paid little or no attention 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 foreign languages in those days seemed to have no ability to produce correct pronunciation However, current approaches to teaching pronunciation contrast widely with the early ones 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 require learners 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 often dissatisfied In the light of communicative language teaching( CLT), learners are expected to achieve intelligible pronunciation of the target language This trend has received great acceptance in all over the world So what is meant by “intelligible pronunciation”? According to Kenworthy, J ( 1987 ), intelligibility is understood by a listener at a given time in a given situation That is, students are able to understand, accept and declare to be recognized meaningfully in oral communication In other words, in the light of CLT, the target of teaching pronunciation is to help students to be able to 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 main target 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 and Vietnamese For most of Vietnamese learners, learning English pronunciation is of great hard In teaching pronunciation, mother tongue is a factor that has great influence on acquiring any foreign languages And acquiring a foreign sound system is always of great hard to the learners According to Nunan (1991), the problems of acquiring the phonology of the second language presents formidable challenge to any theory of second language acquisition Mother tongue can influence learners’ acquisition of foreign languages in some ways such as transference and interference Transference means that the similarities between the phonetic and phonemic systems of the first and the second languages can facilitate the acquisition of pronunciation, and interference means that the differences between the two languages can hinder the process of pronunciation acquisition That is why 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 two languages, English and Vietnamese, should be conducted By doing this, we can see the main problems that students often meet when learning English pronunciation more easily Analyzing the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese sound systems can make us 10 problem Most of the students here did not pronounce word-ending sounds, especially the three word- final fortis stops consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, and three dental consonant stops /f/, /v/, /ð/ I heard many students omit these ending sounds when they spoke English With a sentence like : “I have to sleep in a tent, the weather might be bad”, the students could pronounce “ I to slee in a ten, the weather migh be ba” Or a sentence like “ I have to hire a coach, which costs a lot of money” may be pronounced like “ I to hi a coat, which cost me a lot of money” ( Unit 14- speaking) Further more, students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School also made mistakes when they pronounce the two consonants /ð/ and / θ/ Most of the sound /θ/ is pronounced the same as a heavily aspirated stop /t/ in Vietnamese and they also substituted a /d/ for /ð/ Another problem that I found out when observing these lessons is that students also got difficulties in distinguishing the two vowels /e/ and / æ / The sound / æ / was mostly pronounced like /e/ That is why students often have difficulties in distinguish between “bad” and “bed” or “men” and “man” That is about vowel and consonant problems With more in-depth observation, there were many other pronunciation problems such as consonant clusters In English, we have to learn to produce a large variety of new syllable types that contain consonant clusters But these students tend to delete one or more consonants from a difficult cluster For example, the word “first” was pronounced “firt” without no “s” between “r” and “t”, or some might pronounce “firs” without no “t” at the end of the word Even worse, many mistakes were made incredibly When observing the lessons, I took a lot of notes of many other pronunciation problems that can not be categorized into any groups problems The following are some nice examples: expertise : /ekspɜ:ti:z/ into /ekspɜ:taɪz/ will : /wɪl/ into /wɪn/ exercise : /eksəsaɪz/ into /ɪksəsaɪz/ 46 experiment : /ɪksperɪmənt/ into /ɪkspɪərɪmənt/ cold : /k ǝʊld/ into /k u:d/ I also found out that –s and –ed endings are also a difficulty for these students Most of the students pronounced the –ed ending into /id/ whenever it should have been /t/ or /d/ All the –ed was pronounced /id/ although I heard the teacher corrected several times in front of the whole class From classroom observation, I also saw that learners here were not really willing to speak English in classroom And the techniques that the teachers used to teach them were not really various and interesting Further more, these teachers did not pay much attention to correct students’ error in pronunciation 4.1.3.2 Stress, rhythm and intonation Word stress is a problem for not only Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School but also for most Vietnamese students As I stated in the literature review, Vietnamese language is a tone language and each word consist of one syllable, that is why Vietnamese learners of English are not familiar with stress Bounded in the same situation, Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School students also had stress problems Both in speaking and grammar lessons, most students did not give a stress when they spoke English And if some did, they might give incorrect locations of the stresses But the number of these students is very low Most students did not give any stress when they pronounced English As a result, they also failed to differentiate sufficiently between stressed and unstressed vowels, producing full vowels in unstressed syllables So they may pronounce a word like “possibility” into / posɪbɪlɪtɪ/ or the word “economy” into /ɪkɒnɒmɪ/ As I stated in the literature review, Vietnamese may have difficulties with the characteristic intonation patterns of English because pitch functions differently in Vietnamese When observing the lessons, I did realize that this was a serious problem Further more, because of the accents in this area, students here are seriously affected by the pitch level Many of them did not give an enough fall or rise pitch that could cause 47 misinterpreting of the speaker’s utterances I observed that students here did not give a final rising in yes-no questions, or a final rising-falling in statements, command and whquestions However, with an elementary level, this problem is not really a serious problem although their pronunciation does not does not seem to be any native-like English at all With the interview instrument, I found out some main pronunciation problems when students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School spoke English However, this would not have been sufficient if I had not employed classroom observation This method supplemented the first instrument It gave me more data for analysis From my own observation, I found out that students here had the main problems as investigated from the interview such as word- ending sounds, stress, intonation and rhythm However, with my English level, I could see the problems more clearly from classroom observation than from the interview 4.2.Conclusion: This chapter, chapter IV, presents the findings of the study to answer the two questions proposed in 1.3 First of all, the analysis of the data shows that Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School students had positive attitude towards learning English and they were aware of the importance of learning English for their future as well as for their exams They were also aware of the importance of learning English pronunciation Most of them stated that English pronunciation can help them achieve the right target in learning English, that is to communicate well with the others However, the students here had a lot of difficulties in learning English pronunciation Data analysis from interview and classroom observation shows that Vietnamese students have problems with some English vowels such as /e/ vs /æ/, some consonants such as /p/, /t/,/k/, etc , word endings, stress, rhythm and intonation 48 Chapter V: Recommendations and conclusions In this last chapter, the findings of the study will be summarized first, then some suggestions for teaching English pronunciation will be followed This chapter also discusses the limitations if the study as well as some recommendations for further research 5.1 Summary of the findings With the aims stated in the first Introduction part, I did my research with some issues concerning English pronunciation learning These issues include students’ general attitude towards learning English and English pronunciation, students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation Firstly, the findings show that most of the students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School students have positive attitude toward learning English They are aware of the importance of learning English for their exams and their future jobs Most of them also see the importance of English pronunciation They stated that without good English pronunciation, they would fail to communicate with the foreigners However, a quite large number of these respondents did not realize the role of English pronunciation For these ones, traditional English tests and teaching have not focused much on pronunciation, so they are not familiar with learning it Further more, English pronunciation is so difficult, that is why they want to ignore it The second findings to the question proposed is that students have difficulties in learning English pronunciation From the questionnaires, interview and classroom observation, I found out that the main problems, firstly to say, are word- ending sounds The main word ending sounds that students often have problems with are the ending consonant stops /s/, /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, /v/, /ð/, /θ/ The problem is that they often omit these word ending sounds Further more, they also have problems with –ed and –s endings Most of the students often pronounce all the –ed endings into /id/ and all the –s endings into /s/ They also make mistakes with some English couples such as /e/ vs / æ /, /z/ vs /ð/, /t/ and / θ/ The second serious problem that students often make is stress Students pronounce 49 most of the words that consist of two or more than two syllables with no stress And if they give any stress, they rarely give the correct place of the stress As a certain, students here have problems with rhythm and intonation Especially, students here are strongly affected by Ha Tinh accent The last issue that was investigated from the study was about teaching English pronunciation methods From my observation and interview, I found out that although the teachers at that school did some attempts to help their students overcome pronunciation problems, they did not employ enough various techniques to make the lessons more interesting and easier to understand The lessons seemed to be rather boring, and even I heard some teachers make serious pronunciation mistakes So the problems here may be not only for the students but also for the teachers of English to think Teachers should try to improve their pronunciation and their teaching methods to help their students overcome the problems In short, the study mainly focused on the difficulties that students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School often met when they learned English pronunciation The main problems, as stated in the Findings, were word-ending sounds, stress and intonation 5.2 Suggestions for pronunciation teaching in upper secondary schools In accordance with the above findings, the followings will be some suggestions for English pronunciation teaching for upper secondary school teachers of English First of all, as I mentioned in the first part, the teachers’ methods of pronunciation teaching plays a very important role in motivating and improving students’ English in general and students’ pronunciation in particular If the techniques employed in the lessons are various and suitable, they will make the lesson easier to understand and more interesting to follow As a result, the students will be motivated to study With the fact that most classes in Vietnamese upper secondary schools are large and heterogeneous, it is very difficult for teachers to individualize their teaching So, teachers should be aware of this difficulty and vary their techniques and activities so that they can involve more students in the lessons By doing so, they can also reduce the boredom of the lesson at the same time There is a saying that “no method is best” There are many different techniques for teachers to choose What teachers have to with these various techniques is to choose suitable ones to the students’ 50 level, teaching conditions and learners’ motivation We can apply different techniques for different purposes of teaching pronunciation The followings are some suggestions for teachers to help students overcome problems in learning pronunciation However, as I mentioned earlier, no method is best The followings are just some suggested recommendations 5.2.1 Teaching pronunciation on the level of accuracy: Teaching individual sounds The first issue in teaching pronunciation on the level of accuracy is teaching individual sounds 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 individual sounds are minimal pairs, information-gap activities, matching exercises, chain stories, fluency activities, dialogues, role plays and games These various techniques can help students improve their learning pronunciation, and at the same time, they can motivate learning atmosphere The followings are the detail description of some techniques: Bilingual 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 techniques 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 have made in each case by shouting out the language “Vietnamese” or “ English” Missing words: (A Doff, (1988)) Another very simple way to teach individual sounds is using missing words Using this techniques, 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 : 51 A boy and a ….(girl) This is a …… of wine (glass) Making sentences (A Doff, (1988)) With this technique, the teacher can help his students to practise either one sound or two similar sounds that the students may get confused Firstly, the teacher provides them with two groups of words that consist the sounds need practising and gets the students to work in pairs For example, if the sounds need practising are /ɜ:/ and /ǝ/, the teachers should present two lists of words of opposite sounds on the board like this: Group 1: Group 2: girl economy alternative possibility further sister nurse recorder surname preparation He can ask students to make three sentences with words of two groups In order to make them know what to do, the teacher can make some examples first Then the teacher can ask one student from a group to read out their sentences, the teacher may correct immediately if the student makes a serious mistake in pronouncing sounds, stress or intonation 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 Sounds discrimination exercise: (T Bowen, and J Marks, (1992)) 52 This activity can help to sentitise 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 Information gap activities:(P Avery and S Erhlich (1992) ) One of the easiest techniques for practising consonants in a communicative way is to use information gap activities For example, if the students are confused with two sounds /b/ and /v/, we can use the following activity to help them overcome this Choose a topic such as food and have students brainstorm and think of as many related words as possible which contain the sound /b/ and /v/.It is best for students to work in groups so that they have more opportunity to generate these words in a communicative fashion, If students are beginners, it is good for teachers to provide them with pictures or clues Students might come up with “berry”, “veal”, “liver”, “vegetables”, “vitamins”, etc Teachers can also ask students to generate examples of names containing these two sounds When enough words have been generated, the teacher can number the names and foods on slips of paper and hand out even- numbered foods and odd- numbered names to one group and odd- numbered foods and even- numbered names to another group Teachers can also hand out blank grids and have students work in pairs or in groups questioning each other about “ who bought what at the store” Once the grids are filled out, the result of the activities can be presented to the class In so doing, the students gain further communicative practice with these sounds Role play which incorporate some of the food words and names identified above can be used as a follow up to this activities Variations on these activities can be carried out with many pronunciation contrast around a variety of themes 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, group B has a picture containing all of the people of which there are 53 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: Becky and Peter Students might describe the pictures as followings: Becky is carrying a big bag Becky’s shoes are black Peter is playing football Peter is playing near a park In attempting to match the descriptor with the appropriate person, the students gain practice producing the relevant sounds A variation on this activity has these descriptors generated by the students themselves Creating such descriptors, especially in groups, provide additional communicative practice of the consonants Chain stories:(P Avery and S Erhlich (1992) ) Each student receives a phrase containing the sound contrast being practised The first student must embed that phrase in a short story of no longer than four sentences The task of the other students is to guess the embeded phrase based on the correct pronunciation of the relevant sound or sound contrast The next student continues the story using the phrase that he has received Fluency-square activities: (P Avery and S Erhlich (1992) ) A less communicative technique, requiring less preparation for teachers is fluencysquare There are four illustrated squares used to contrast at least two sounds A larger square is divided into four squares with each of the smaller squares depicting an activity differing from a contrasting square in terms of one variable For example: Square 1: Cassie took a bus this morning Square 2: Cassie took a bath this morning Square 3: Cathy took a bus this morning 54 Square 4: Cathy took a bath this morning Squares and differ in the contrast between /s/ and / θ/ in “Cassie” and “Cathy” Squares and and squares and differ in the contrast between /s/ and /θ/ in “ bath” and “bus”, etc Students must describe the activities in each square so that another student is able to identify the correct square For students to be able to gain the correct information about the activities, they have to be able to both hear and produce the differences between these consonant contrast 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 5.2.2 Teaching pronunciation on the level of fluency With a higher level, level of fluency, we need to teach our students consonant clusters, stress, rhythm and intonation The followings are some techniques to teach these matters 5.2.2.1 Teaching consonant clusters As I mentioned in chapter II that consonant clusters are troublesome for Vietnamese students because Vietnamese students are familiar with the model vowel-consonant-vowel In English, consonant clusters have two positions, initial and final Most of Vietnamese students often have more difficulties with the final consonant clusters than the initial ones In this case, teachers of English should combine different techniques, using demonstration combined with association and explanation The followings are some techniques from the easy type to more difficult and meaningful practice: Listen and repeat individual words containing consonant clusters Listen and repeat the phrases containing consonant clusters Listen and repeat conversation containing consonant clusters 5.2.2.2 Stress, rhythm and intonation There are several techniques that teachers can use to teach pronunciation of fluency level They are conducting, tapping, nonsense syllables, slow speech, backward buildup, etc However, because this is just a suggested recommendation for teaching pronunciation, I will 55 just go deeper into more details with some techniques Dialogues, role plays and games: :(P Avery and S Erhlich (1992) ) Other ways to teach contractions, linking and common reduced expressions are using dialogues, role plays or games These activities not only provide students opportunity to practise but also create an interesting atmosphere to learn We can give students an original dialogue and then create role plays of the same situation without using the original dialogue When students role plays, many high lighted words will be generated We can also use games to teach student consonants such as Bingo game or Tic-Tac-Toe These games can be used to help learners practise consonant contrasts Conducting: :(P Avery and S Erhlich (1992) ) The most widely used techniques to teach stress, rhythm and intonation is by conducting Teachers of English can use hands and harms to show the stress, rhythm and intonation of a word, a phrase or a sentence For example, teachers can use a rapid downward motion of the arm to indicate which syllable receive the major stress in a word Or when teachers want to illustrate intonation patterns, they can raise or lower their arms when they speak the sentence to demonstrate the rising or falling contours After showing the models, teachers can ask students to the conduct again Tapping:(Peter Avery and Susan Erhlich (1992) ) This is a good way to encourage our students to produce English with correct stress and rhythm The teachers can tap on a desk or a table with their tips, fingers or even a pencil to demonstrate the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables of words, phrases or sentences The teachers can tap only on the stressed syllables or on both the stressed and unstressed syllables Backward buildup: :(P Avery and S Erhlich (1992) ) or Back-chaining (D Adrian (1988) With over longer utterances, we can develop our students’ fluency and improve linking and intonation by backward buildup The technique involves starting with the final word of a sentence and adding to it the preceding words, one at a time For example: I can’t understand anything you are saying 56 Will be built up from the back-word: Saying Are saying You are saying Anything you are saying Understand anything you are saying Can’t understand anything you are saying I can’t understand anything you are saying Penny Ur (1991) has also suggested some following techniques that may help to improve students’ English pronunciation: - Imitation of teacher or recorded model of sounds, words and sentences - recording of learner’s speech, contrasted with native model - systematic explanation and instruction ( including details of the structure and movement of parts of the mouth) - imitation drills: repetition of sounds, words and sentences - Choral repetition of drills - varied repetition of drills.( varied speed, volume and mood) - learning by heart of sentences, rhymes and jingles - jazz-chants - tongue twisters - self-correction through listening to recording of own speech In short, 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 for you to reference 5.3 Limitations of the study 57 Although I have tried much to have some useful findings, the study, like many other studies, has some limitations Firstly, there are some limitations in terms of research methodology Although I employ different techniques to complement one another, they may not sufficient to get the most reliable data The respondents might not have given their full thought when answering the questionnaires Further more, in the interview, there were only ten teachers participated, so there might have been more problems that I did not investigate In addition, when observing these English classes, I did not record, I just took notes as much as possible This could be a limitation because during the time of observing, I could not record all the pronunciation mistakes that the students made In brief, all the above are the main and important limitations I had during my research There must be other limitations but the above are some main and important ones that I want to mention here 5.4 Recommendations for further study In this study, because of limited time and space, there are some issues that have not been studied Basing on the findings and the limitations of the study, I would like to give some recommendations for further studies as followings: First of all, because of the limited time, I did not study to find which techniques of teaching pronunciation would be appropriate for the students at that school So, an investigation into suitable techniques to apply to teaching students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School English pronunciation should be conducted Secondly, as I stated in the first part that Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School is located in a mountainous area in Ha Tinh where there are many particular characteristics, it can not be generalized into all other schools in our country although pronunciation is a generally serious problem in teaching and learning English in our country Therefore, further study on this issue in many other schools located in different areas should also be conducted 58 5.5.Conclusion In conclusion, the study was carried out to investigate the pronunciation problems at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School It helped me to find out not only the problems but also some main causes of these problems so that we could find out the ways to help the students overcome these problems The study were expected to be a very useful indication for the teachers here to think about the methodology they are applying to teaching English pronunciation The findings of the study shows that most of the students here had difficulties acquiring some final consonant stops which not exist in the Vietnamese language, some similar pairs such as /æ/ vs /e/, /ɔ:/ vs /ɒ/, /ð/ vs /z/, etc., especially they had a big problem with stress, rhythm and intonation The findings also gave us some main reasons for these difficulties such which were the influence of the mother tongue, the poor learning condition and the lack of opportunities to practise English pronunciation Based on the results of the findings, the study also provided with some recommendations for teaching English pronunciation which were expected to help them overcome all the problems If the teachers understand the problems throughly and apply the recommended techniques to teaching pronunciation suitably, the matter will certainly be improved 59 60 ... on Phuc Trach Upper Secondary students? ?difficulties in learning English pronunciation entitled: ? ?An investigation into Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School students’ difficulties in learning English. .. 11th students in Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School This study was aimed at exploring Phuc Trach Upper Secondary students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation and giving some suggested... evaluation on difficulties in learning English intonation Table shows that students here get difficulties in learning English intonation 82 respondents (82%) confessed that learning English intonation