Đề tài An investigation into Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School students

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 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 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 do 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 do 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. 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 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: What are their main difficulties in learning English pronunciation? 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 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 of teaching experience. Furthermore, the students there mostly come from poor families. They do 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 do 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 native-like pronunciation. In fact, some adults do 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 do 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 do so. Teachers of foreign languages should be aware of this so that they can encourage students to overcome these difficulties in learning pronunciation. To do so, teachers have to strive to create a non-threatening 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 do 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 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 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 examine the difficulties more easily and can help the process of teaching English pronunciation. The contrastive analysis will be on five different categories. The most clear difference between the two language sound systems may be that Vietnamese is basically monosyllabic language, whereas English is a multi-syllabic language. Because of this difference, students often have difficulties when learning English pronunciation, especially when they have to cope with stress, breath control and derivative words in English. The first problem that Vietnamese students meet because of the above difference is stress. Vietnamese learners are familiar with the monosyllabic language, so it is very difficult for them to remember a long word with more than one syllable. In Vietnamese, the monosyllable nature means Vietnamese words have no stress. So it is even more difficult for them to join the syllables in a multi-syllable word together and put a stress to any English words. Further more, word stress in English has no orthographic indication, so it is very difficult for students to learn by heart. That is why stress is a common mistake for Vietnamese students. As a result, Vietnamese learners need to get familiar with the concept of word stress, which is rather different from the concept of tones in Vietnamese. In Vietnamese, tones are always phonemic, while in English, stress placement can be phonemic but not always. This difference also makes students difficult to learn English pronunciation. Moreover, English stress placements can be changed by the addition of the prefixes and suffixes or with different vocabulary items. So, stress seems to be of great challenge to Vietnamese students. Another matter that the monosyllable nature of Vietnamese language causes is that Vietnamese students are not familiar with the characteristic of weaken vowels, which is conjunction with unstressed syllables. It means that stressed syllables in English is spoken with more effort and energy meanwhile the unstressed ones are spoken with less effort and the vowels in unstressed syllables are weakened. This characteristic does not exist in Vietnamese. So Vietnamese students often produce all English syllables with an even tone. And it is very difficult for them to remember that they have to reduce the vowels in unstressed syllables into schwa. In short, the difference of monosyllabic and multi-syllabic natures between the two languages causes a lot of difficulty to learners when they acquire the English pronunciation. Secondly, in English, the breath has to be used more strongly than in Vietnamese and syllables as well as words are linked together via close juncture. The articulation of the final boundaries of words and syllables is often stronger. In contrast, Vietnamese words are spoken with weakened breath out flow at the final boundary with distinct separation between words. Because of this difference, Vietnamese students often make mistakes when they speak English. They often speak English words and syllables seperatedly. So when they listen to the native English speakers, it is very difficult for them to understand because these native English speakers often link the last consonant of the words to the following word which begins with a vowel. Within a word, linking word is a great problem for Vietnamese 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 word often has three or less than three phonemes. Because of this, consonant clusters do not exist in Vietnamese whereas in English, clusters do exist a lot. And in English, consonant clusters can appear at the initial or final positions, a word can begin with one , two or three consonants (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 to acquire the foreign language. However, for Vietnamese students, final consonant clusters seem to be more difficult for them to pronounce and they often obmit one or two final consonants. The problem will be in more details in the following parts. Vietnamese often pay little attention to intonation. Doan Thien Thuat explained that they do not pay much attention to intonation because a tone language often has very limited 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, for example, they can use the particles hả, hử, á, ạ, etc. to make a question, or some particles such as ôi, ối, á, quá, thật, làm sao, etc. to make an exclamative sentence. It means that Vietnamese change different kinds of sentences with lexical items, not with intonation. However, these particles are often pronounced with higher or stronger voice, which means that intonation also plays a little role in making different kinds of sentences. On the other hand, in English, intonation plays a very important role in changing the meaning of a sentence. 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 often get a lot of difficulty in getting the right messages of the speakers when they speak English. They are now aware of the role of intonation in English, so utterences are often produced incorrectly, when they need to give a falling tune, they may give a rising one or when they need to give a rising tune, they give a falling one. That is why intonation can be seen a serious problem for Vietnamese students when they learn English. Fouthly, The sound systems between the two languages also differs greatly. First of all, there are many consonants and vowels that occur in English but do not occur in Vietnamese 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 Vietnamese only 23 consonants, 13 vowels and 3 diphthongs exist. This difference makes students difficult to acquire the English sound system. Firstly, we will examine the difference of the vowel systems between the two languages. In Vietnamese , there are only 13 vowels and 3 diphthongs meanwhile in English there are 20 vowels including 7 short vowels, 5 long vowels and 8 diphthongs. The most clear difference between the two vowel systems is that in Vietnamese, no long vowel exists. That is why Vietnamese students are not familiar with the concept of long vowels and they often produce a short vowel instead of a long vowel. Further more, in Vietnamese, diphthongs are not rarely followed by a last consonant but in English, they are common. So when our students meet a cluster that includes a diphthong and ended by a vowel, it is very difficult for them to produce the whole word, instead, they often omit the final 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 the two sound systems. It is clear that there are a lot of differences in the comparison of consonants 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, ∫.The classification of these consonants is based on the manner of articulation and place of articulation. Vietnamese is different from English. It has twenty-two initial consonants pointed out by Doan Thien Thuat (initial consonants are ones which stand at the beginning of a syllable) . They are : b, m, f, v, t’, t, d, n, s, z , l, ţ, ş, z, , c, …k, ŋ, x, γ, p, h. The classification of them is also based on the two criteria above but it is more particular and peculiar. Comparing the two consonant systems, we can see that, firstly, there are some English 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. They are not familiar with these ones, so it is very difficult for them to produce the correct sounds of 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 grammar which do not occur in Vietnamese. That is ‘s-ending’ in plural nouns, the third singular personal verbs (Simple Present tense) and “ed-ending’ in regular past verbs and regular past 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 reason for this is that in Vietnamese, there is no concept of the voiced consonants and voiceless consonants. If teachers provide learners with some main classifications of consonants including the state of the vocal cords (voiced and voiceless), learners can avoid wrong pronunciation 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, voiceless or some specific sounds….In addition, Vietnamese learners have a confusion of the form of the indefinite article: ‘a/an’ and the way to pronounce definite article: ‘the’. They know that ‘a’ stands before a consonant and ‘an’ before a vowel but sometimes they can’t explain some problems such as a university, an M.P, an hour…and they still make mistakes. 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 English phonetic symbols, specially consonants. Consequently, teachers should pay attention to the missing 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 are some examples: car /ka:/ romantic /rǝʊmổntɪk/ day /dei/ alternative /ɔ:ltɜ:nǝtɪv/ In English, the alphabet “a” can be pronounced in many different ways such as /a:/, /ổ/, /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 that can cause difficulties to Vietnamese learners when they learn English. The comparison gives clearer cut reasons why our learners often make mistakes when they learn English pronunciation. This is the foundation for me to study students’s main difficulties in acquiring English pronunciation more easily and scientifically. 2.5. Some common pronunciation problems. Doff, A.(1988:113) pointed out that students in different countries have different problems with English pronunciation. However, there are some common pronunciation problems that learners often make when they speak English. According to him, there are some main categories of common problems that are likely to occur as followings: - Difficulties in pronouncing sounds which do not exist in the students’ own language. For example, the consonant /ð/ is of great hard for Vietnamese students of English 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 share articulatory 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 students often have problems in producing vowel distinctions. The reason for this is because there are more vowels in English than in other languages. As we can see an example in 4.1.4 that in English there are 20 vowels including 7 short vowels, 5 long vowels and 8 diphthongs meanwhile in Vietnamese there are only 13 vowels and 3 diphthongs, or even fewer, in Japanese, there are only five vowels. That is why students in many other countries often meet a lot of difficulties in learning English vowels. The followings are some common vowel 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. /ổ/ 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 learners produce the pairs of vowel sounds with the same manner which can cause a lot of misunderstanding. The above are some common vowel mistakes that students in the world often make when 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 see common consonant problems according to particular articulatory features because learners often have difficulties with a set of sounds that share articulatory features rather than with isolated sounds. The followings are some main problems and some tips for teachers to help their learners 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 a word. 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. Most commonly, they will be able to produce voiceless fricatives but not voiced ones. For example, /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 pronounced as “peace” Problem 3: Voicing of final stop consonants /b/, /d/, and /g/ Many English second language students will not voice final stops, but will substitute a voiceless stop for a voiced one. Thus, “cub” may sound like “cup”. It is more difficult to demonstrate the voiced and voiceless distinction with stops than with fricatives because stops can not be prolonged. However, final voicing does affect the pronunciation of preceding vowels. They are longer before voiced consonants than before voiceless consonants. This fact is helpful in 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 consonant clusters. 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 them to 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 they acquire 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. These grammatical 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 two difficult 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 are very 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 syllables receive shorter, unclearer and weaker voice. However, in many other languages, stress does not exist. That is why students of many other countries find it difficult to master the acoustic properties of the English stress system. In English, stress can fall on any syllable of word, and there is no orthorgraphic indication to learn about English stress. Further more, the place of the stress of a word, as I mentioned above, can be changed when we add prefixes and suffixes which can cause a lot of difficulties to the students According to Avery, P. and Ehrlich, S.(1992), rhythm and intonation are also common 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, we can change the meaning of a sentence with different intonation which do not exist in many languages. That is why many English second language learners fail to give the correct intonation that can cause misunderstanding to the listeners. In short, in this part, I give a brief comment on common mistakes that English second language students often meet. This involves vowel common mistakes, consonant common mistakes, stress, rhythm and intonation problems. Considering the common difficulties that students in the world can make us easier to see common pronunciation problems that Vietnamese students often meet. 2.6. Some common pronunciation problems that Vietnamese students often meet when they learn English consonants As I have mentioned above, because the sound systems of English and Vietnamese differ greatly, Vietnamese speakers can have some pronunciation problems. Vietnamese is a tone language, that is, pitch changes distinguish word meaning. Most words in Vietnamese consist of only one syllable, there are fewer consonants than in English and there is no consonant cluster. That is why they often meet some main problems when producing English as below: 2.6.1. Vowel problems. Avery, P. and Ehrlich, S.(1992) pointed out that while Vietnamese makes many vowel distinctions, the English lax vowel pairs are still problems to them. They often meet difficulties in distinguishing vowels pairs such as /e/ vs. /ổ, /Λ/ vs. /a/, short “I” vs. long /i:/, /ə/vs. /ɜ:/, /ɒ/vs. /ɔ:/. Vietnamese students often produce the same manner with these two 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 problems that 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 often meet 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 a word, but these consonants are never released in final position and is much shorter than their English equivalents. This means that even when Vietnamese speakers pronounce these 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 need practise 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 end of 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 final position of a word, but in English, they do. That is why Vietnamese students often omit these 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 two consonants 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” in English. . In fact, the manner of producing these Vietnamese sounds are different from the two / θ/ and /ð/, but their sounds seem a little the same. That is why Vietnamese students often 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 many consonants 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 a consonant 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, there must 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 the final 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 is caused because Vietnamese is a tonal language, and intonation plays very little role in changing the meaning of a sentence. Instead, we often use particles to change the meaning of 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. With different intonation, the meaning of an utterance can change differently. Vietnamese are not familiar with this, so they often pay little attention to intonation, which plays a very important role in English language. In conclusion, this chapter presents a literature review of English pronunciation teaching which includes many related issues such as the importance of English pronunciation, the factors that can affect pronunciation acquisition process, the pronunciation teaching methodologies, a contrast between the Vietnamese and English sound systems and common problems that students in general and Vietnamese students in particular often meet. This literature review provides me with a better understanding the phenomenon and that can help me do my research more scientifically. Chapter III: Research methodology The research methodology was presented briefly in the first chapter, the Introduction. 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: Do students in Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School have difficulties in learning English pronunciation? What are their main difficulties as perspected by the students? What may be the causes of these difficulties? With these three research questions, the study will investigate secondary school students’ difficulties as well as the causes of these difficulties in learning English pronunciation. 3.1.2.Method orientation. As stated in the first chapter, to gain the aims with high reliabiity, the research employed different methods of a case study. That is classroom observation and questionnaires. These methods were used to collect data from students in Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School in Ha Tinh with the intention of addressing the aims of the study and then anlyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. According to Larsen-Freeman and Long( 1991:14), both qualitative and quantitative paradigms are not competing but complementary and the choice between them is not necessary. They mentioned that to gain the aims with high reliabiity, researchers should make a combination of these two paradigms. 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 the term “case study” should be presented. As cited in Jaeger, (1988) by an unidentified student , a case study is what you call a 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 is ambiguous. However, the term “bounded system” defines the method for him. Johnson (1992) defines that a case study is a study which focuses holistically on an entity. In other words, a case study is a study which involves a detailed exploration of a single 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’t necessarily a cultural context. It can be any context as long as the context is relevant to the research questions. The second characteristic is that it focuses on an individual. In other words, case studies seek to investigate one single small group of subjects only. It is concerned with the documentation and analysis of a single instance. A case study, that is to say, 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 case studies the continual refining of hypothesis is not reflected. Because he can not know what theories or explanations make the most sense until he gets in there and select the data, gets to 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 and search 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 subjective accounts of data. According to McDonough & McDonough (1997:204), the study of cases is not only a qualitative undertaking, nor does it present an either/or perspective in quantitative / qualitative terms. Most of case study is quantitative because the weight of discussion on case study is on interpretive approach. However, it depends on the size of scale trend to be qualitative or quantitative or both. For example, when the researchers need to study large scale trends, cases will be usually selected on the basic of random sampling and the data submitted to stastical analysis. A case study is always selected because it deals with a considerably current issue. A case study focuses holistically on an entity. 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 my research. 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 of my research is to investigate the difficulties that Phuc Trach Upper Secondary students meet when they learn English pronunciation and to recommend some suggestions for teachers and learners to overcome these difficulties. The purpose of the study also stimulates me to choose a case study for my research methods. 3.1.4. The participants: With the questionnaire and classroom observation instruments, the participants are the students in two randomly selected classes to be the participants. They are both male and female. Among 100 respondents, 59 were female and 41 were male. All of them are at grade 11th who have been learning English for five years. I chose these grade 11th students to be the participants of the study because, firstly, they have two years of working with the new 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 on pronunciation than the old text book. So the 11th grade students also have more time to deal with learning pronunciation. Further more, the 11th grade students also have more time to help me get the data meanwhile the 12th ones are busy preparing for the graduation exams. These 100 students were chosen randomly without no criteria set before. With this random selection, I hope to receive the most reliable and honest data from the questionnaires. In the questionnaires, I explained that their answers would be anonymous and my aim at giving them the questionnaires are just to get the data for the research without any other aims. With the interview instrument, the participants were ten teachers of English at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School. Among them, there were seven male teachers and three female 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 classroom observation, questionnaires and interviews The questions and interviews are designed into investigate these main following categories: - General attitude to learning English as well as speaking skill. - Students’ main difficulties in learning English pronunciation as experienced by the 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 using questionnaires. The reason for this is that, firstly, it is easy for us to construct and it does not either consume time or cost money. Secondly, questionnaires can help us to collect data in field setting, and the data themselves are more amenable to quantification then discursive data such as free-form field-notes, participant observers’ journals or transcripts of oral language (David Nunan 1992:143). Further more, we can achieve respondent anonymity when applying this type of instrument. There are two types of questions, closed and open-ended questions. The former kind of questions are often used to get answers which are factual or fairly predictable, meanwhile open-ended questions are preferred when the researchers expect to get answers which are in terms of opinions, beliefs or judgments. Further more, open-ended questions also give the respondents chances to express more opinions individually . Because of these above reasons, both two types of questionnaires were employed to get the data. To get the data reliably and avoid problems such as respondents’ shyness, the questionnaires were started with explaints about its aims as well as its respondent anonymity. In order that the students had no pressure of time and freedom, they were let to finish the questions at home for one day. Further more, all the questions were written in Vietnamese so that they could be at their best to understand the questions and express their thoughts and ideas. With the aims stated in the Introduction part, I handed out the questionnaires to the students. These questions were aimed at exploring students’ general attitude towards learning 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 are the 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 so that I could do the data analysis. 3.1.5.2.Interview 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 interview in classroom research. The first application is to focus on a specific aspect of classroom life in detail, the second is to get diagnostic information, and the third is to improve the classroom 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 interview instrument is very suitable to be applied. The questionnaires were used to investigate students’ general attitude towards learning English, English pronunciation and students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation, This second instrument, the interview, was used 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 are more experienced and better at expressing the problems. So, ten teachers of English teaching at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School were selected for a follow- up interview for more details in difficulties that studends often meet when learning English pronunciation. 3.1.5.3. Classroom observation: To suppliment the first and second instrument, the questionnaires and interview, I employed classroom observation for more data. Certainly, classroom observation is an instrument that can help researchers bolster the qualitative and quantitative results. Hopkins(1993) described classroom observation as a “pivotal activity” with a crucial role to play in classroom research, teachers’ personal professional growth, and school development 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 can help me test the validity of the data obtained about students’ attitude towards learning English pronunciation and their difficulties. When observing the class, I did a lot of note taking as well as audio-taping to ensure that the information collected was rich and triangulated . To make the students feel comfortable in the lessons, I just sat at the last row and took part in five different lessons as 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 and classroom 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 includes six main points: research questions, method orientation, characteristics of a case study, the participants, the instruments and data analysis process. With the methodology presented, I hope to get the most triangulated and reliable as well 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 English and English pronunciation as well as their difficulties when learning English pronunciation, all the questionnaires were gathered and analyzed both descriptively and interpretively. The results shown below are rather significant to the research. For more details, I selected main results to present as following. 4.1.1.1. Students’ general attitude towards learning English. In the questionnaires, the first question was made to investigate students’ general attitudes towards learning English. The first question asked the respondents if they liked learning English or not. There were four choices for them. After doing some statistics, the results were summarized as shown in the below table: Number of respondents Like learning English very much (%) Like learning English (%) Do not like (%) Neither like nor dislike (%) 100 34 45 16 5 Table 1: Students’ general attitude towards learning English Table 1 shows that most of the students here like learning English. There were 34 respondents who chose the answer “Like learning English very much” and 45 respondents who chose “Like learning English “. So in total the percentage of the respondents who liked learning English was 79% meanwhile only a small number (16%) disliked learning English and 5% of the 100 respondents said that they neither liked nor disliked learning English. The 79 students who chose the answer “like or like very much learning English also gave more reasons for being interested in the subjects. I chose some typical ones and then translate into English as below: • I think learning English can help people get a better job with high salary in the future. • Learning English is rather important because it is a compulsory subject when we are students. • I like learning English because it can bring me many opportunities to communicate 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 all people to acquire it. • Being able to speak English well is very interesting, it can help me sing English songs or watch international programs. In short, most of the students who chose the first and second answers recognized the importance of English. Meanwhile, most of the 16 students who disliked learning English 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. The below are some interesting expressions: • I dislike learning English because it is so difficult. I can not even know the use of any tenses. •English is so different from our mother tongue. So most of us find it difficult to speak English. We can’t understand what our teacher says everyday. •Learning English vocabulary is of great hard to me. • I hate learning English although I know some English grammar, I can not understand what the teacher says, especially when our teacher plays the tape, we hardly hear anything. Its pronunciation is so difficult to learn. • Learning English is rather interesting, but its pronunciation is so difficult. From some complaints above, we can conclude that most of the students do not like learning English because it is so difficult, both in grammar and in speaking in general and pronunciation in particular. 4.1.1.2. Students’ awareness of the importance of learning English. The second question were posed to investigate students’ evaluation of the importance of learning English . After doing some statistics, I got a very nice result. All of these 79 respondents who liked learning English expressed their awareness of the importance of learning English. And among 21 respondents who chose the answer “ dislike learning English” or “ neither like nor dislike”, 16 respondents said that although they were aware of the importance of learning English, they could not do it well because it is so difficult, which means that only a small number of the respondents (5 respondents) did not see English any important at all. One female respondent in class 11A5 shared her thought : “I know English is very important not only to our exams but also for our later study, but it is really hard, I hardly understand anything, either grammar or speaking”. Most of the respondents confessed that English was very important to them, and the reason for them to like English or not is its difficulties. In short, with the first and the second questions, I investigated, at least at Phuc Trach Upper secondary School, students’ attitude towards learning English. In general, most of them liked learning English and were aware of the importance of learning English as well. However, many of them complained about the difficulties when they learning English especially in grammar, in speaking in general and pronunciation in particular. This shows that students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation do exist. 4.1.1.3. Students’ awareness of the importance of learning English pronunciation. In the questionnaires, the first and the second questions were made to investigate students’ general attitudes towards learning English and students’ awareness of the importance of learning English . And the third question was to investigate students’ awareness of the importance of learning English pronunciation. The question asked the respondents if they thought learning English pronunciation was important or not . There were four choices for them. After doing some statistics, the results were summarized as shown in the below table Number of respondents Very important (%) Important (%) Not important at all (%) Neither important nor not important (%) 100 41 33 15 11 Table 2: Students’ awareness of the importance of learning English pronunciation. From table 2, we can see that the number of respondents who considered English pronunciation important was 71, of which 41 respondents chose the first answer “very important” and 30 respondents considered English pronunciation was important. These respondents (71students) expressed that without good pronunciation, people could fail to communicate with others. Some of them also gave interesting comments. The followings are some representative ones: • Pronunciation, for me, is very important. Good pronunciation gives people confidence and success in communication. • I think pronunciation can decide whether a person can give the right messages to the listeners or not. • Bad pronunciation can cause a lot of nervousness in speaking. We daren’t speak any English because we are afraid of giving out wrong pronunciation, which can cause misunderstanding or no understanding at all. However, not all these respondents realized its importance. Among 100 respondents, 18 ones thought that pronunciation is not important and 11 ones thought that pronunciation is neither important nor not important. They also added the main reason for them to think that is the objective of the English tests they have to take do not focus much on pronunciation. They showed their ideas as followings: • I just try to study grammar because it is very important to us in the exams. • We do liltte about pronunciation in English tests. To pass the exams, mostly we have to study grammar and vocabulary. That is why we pay little attention to pronunciation. From question 3 (Q3), we can see that most of the respondents here recognized that English pronunciation is not only important in their lessons and exams but also in their daily communication. 4.1.1.4. Students’ evaluation on difficulties in learning English pronunciation With regards to the difficulties in learning English pronunciation (Q4), it is interesting To find that 100% respondents agreed that they had difficulties in learning English pronunciation. With the question “ do you think learning English pronunciation is difficult?”, I gave four choices: - Yes, it is very difficult. Yes, it is rather difficult. It is so so, neither very difficult nor very easy. No, it is very easy. Given four ways of answers as above, there were 72 respondents chose the first answer and the left chose the 2nd choice, which means that all the respondents agreed that learning English pronunciation is difficult. Some of them also gave interesting comments such as : • I find it really difficult to imitate the native-like pronunciation. • When the teacher plays the record, we can not hear anything. • Even my teacher does not give native-like pronunciation, that we find it difficult is a certain. • Mastery of English pronunciation helps students to speak English well, however, we find it really difficult to achieve native-like pronunciation. From some expressions cited above, we can conclude that they all have difficulties in learning English pronunciation. The result shows that learning English pronunciation is really a problem at this school. So an investigation into Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School students’ difficulties in learning English should be done. 4.1.1.5. Students’ difficulties with English vowels. Question 5 was given to the students to address their difficulties with English vowels. Although 100% students agreed that they found English pronunciation difficult, it was shown in the result of this question that they had little trouble with English vowels. 39 respondents said that they had no difficulty with English vowels, 19 % expressed that they had some problems with short and long vowel couples such as / ɒ/ vs. /ɔ:/, /ɪ/ vs. /i:/, and many of them found difficult to distinguish the two vowels /ổ/ and /e/(67%). Despite the result, we should consider whether these respondents could realize their problems and express them or not. This will be complemented by other instruments: classroom observation and interview. In short, question 5 investigated students’ problems with English vowels. The result shows they had some problems with short and long vowel couples and the two vowels /ổ/ and /e/. 4.1.1.6. Students’ difficulties in acquiring English consonants. With the aim at investigating the problems that students may get when they acquiring English consonants, I designed question 6 as following: - Among English consonants, which ones do you find hard to learn? And it can be clearly seen from the result that they had more problems with English consonants than vowels. The most common problems with English consonants were three word- final fortis stops consonants /p/ (81 respondents), /t/ (35 respondents), /k/ 25 %), and three dental consonant stops /f/ (34%), /v/ (34%), /ð/ (53%). They also expressed that they had difficulties with some similar pairs such as / θ/ in English vs. /t/ in Vietnamese and /ð/in English vs. /d/ in Vietnamese. More interestingly, from questions 5 and 6, two respondents answered that they do not know what English vowels are and what consonants are. This is a very considerable point for the teachers and students to think about. 4.1.1.7. Students’ awareness of the concepts of stress, intonation and rhythm. Regarded to students’ awareness of the concepts of stress, intonation and rhythm, I gave them question 7 asking the respondents whether they understood the concepts with 3 possible answers for them to choose. -yes, understand very well - yes, but vaguely -not at all With the first concept, stress, most of the students seemed to understand the concept. There were 82 students who chose the first choice “yes, very well”, and 15 ones chose the second choice “yes, but vaguely” meanwhile only 3 respondents said that they understood nothing about stress. The second category asked students whether they understood intonation concept when they learn English or not. A small number (11%) chose the first choice “yes, very well”, meanwhile a considerable number of students (55%) said that they understood the concept but vaguely and 44% chose the last choice which means that they understood nothing about intonation. More seriously, the concept “rhythm” seemed to be least perceived by the students here. Among 100 respondents, only 8 respondents answered that they understood rhythm well meanwhile 39 ones chose the second answer and the left (53 respondents) answered that they did not understand the concept at all. In short, these three concepts, stress, intonation and rhythm are not understood well by the students here. This is a serious matter because even they do not understand the concepts, how could they avoid the problems caused by these matters? This is shown clearly in the result of three next question, question 8, 9, and 10 which aimed at exploring the difficulties when acquiring English stress, rhythm and intonation. 4.1.1.8. Students’ difficulties in learning English stress Question 8 investigated whether students had difficulties with English stress or not. There were three possible answers for them to choose as following to choose: Yes, very difficult. Yes, but not very difficult. Not difficult at all. As I mentioned in 4.1.1.7, the result showed that this is a serious problem for the students here. Among 100 respondents, there were 67 students who chose the first answer which means that English stress is very difficult for them, 26 ones chose the second choice “Yes, but not very difficult” and the left, 7 students answered that English stress is not difficult at all. In fact, that why English stress is problematic for Vietnamese is very easy to understand when we make a contrast analysis between the two language sound systems as in the literature review. So the above result is understandable although in question 7, there were 82 students answered that they understood the concept “stress” very well, 15 ones chose the second choice “yes, but vaguely” and only 3 respondents answered that they understood nothing about stress. In short, from questions 7 and 8, we can conclude that although students at this school understand the concept “stress”, they almost have difficulties with English stress. 4.1.1.9. Students’ difficulties in learning English rhythm With the regard to students’ difficulties in learning English rhythm, question 9 was designed to check whether the students at this school had problems with it or not. The result shows that English rhythm is really problematic here because 91% said that English rhythm was very difficult for them, 6% said that it was not very difficult, only 3 respondents, all were female, expressed that English rhythm was not difficult for them at all. From the above figures, we can conclude that English rhythm is a serious problem for students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School. Further more, we should also notice that among 3 students who said that it was not difficult at all, they all were female. 4.1.1.10.Students’ difficulties in learning English intonation. With the question “ Do you have difficulties when using intonation to express different meanings of sentences?”, I also gave the respondents three possible answers: Yes, very difficult. Yes, but not very difficult. Not difficult at all. And the following are the result: Number of respondents Yes, very difficult (%) Yes, but not very difficult (%) Not difficult at all (%) 100 82 13 5 Table 3. Students evaluation on difficulties in learning English intonation. Table 3 shows that students here do get difficulties in learning English intonation. 82 respondents (82%) confessed that learning English intonation was of great for them. 13% also found English intonation difficult but not very much, and only 5 % answered that they found it not difficult at all. Question 8, 9 and 10, in short, investigated whether students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School had problems when they acquired English stress, rhythm and intonation. The findings show that these issues are very problematic for them. The majority of these students answered that they had problems with English stress, rhythm and intonation. Only a very small number of these students answered that they found them easy to learn. 4.1.2. Interview: Students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation as experienced by teachers at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School. With ten questions in the questionnaires, I investigated students’ attitude towards learning English and English pronunciation. The instrument also helped me to confirm that students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation do exist. However, with the students' level, it is very difficult for them to express their problems. That is why I employed the second instrument, the interview, to the teachers, to get more data about problems that students here often meet when learning English pronunciation with my belief that the teachers are better at grouping and expressing the pronunciation problems . In order to obtain more in-depth data, ten teachers of English teaching at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School were selected for a structured interview. In fact, at this school, there were only ten teachers of English, and they all were very young, the most experienced was 6 years of teaching and the youngest one was one year of teaching experience. The questions of the interview were made in Vietnamese so that the teachers had no difficulties in expressing their ideas. Moreover, giving them interviews in Vietnamese made them more confident and natural to answer the questions in order to guarantee the truthfulness of the information for data analysis. All the interviews were audio-taped and transcribed for translation. The full transcript of the interview is given in the Appendix. All the interviewees were asked nine same questions in the structured interview: Do you find that your students have difficulties in learning English pronunciation? In your opinion, what are the main problems that students often meet when they learn English pronunciation? Do your students have difficulties when they learn English vowels? What are they? Do your students have difficulties when they learn English consonants? What are they ? Do your students have problems with English consonant clusters? How do they often make mistakes? Do your students often make stress mistakes? If yes, how? Do your students often make rhythm and intonation mistakes? If yes, how? 8. Can you think of the possible reasons for these difficulties? 9. What can you do in your lessons to help your students overcome these difficulties? Do you think that your methods are effective? For question 1, all of ten respondents agreed that their students do have difficulties in learning English pronunciation. According to these teachers, their learners make a lot of mistakes when producing any English , from single words to complex utterances. These teachers also added that their students made so many mistakes in pronunciation when they spoke English that they daren’t speak English in the class. With question 2 which investigated students main difficulties in learning English pronunciation as experienced by the teachers, the respondents gave a lot of problems that their students often meet. However, the following are some main ones: • Teacher 1: My students get many problems in pronunciation when they speak English. The most common ones are word-ending sounds and stress. • Teacher 4: It is very difficult to talk about all the problems that my students have in English pronunciation. I am just able to give out some main ones such as ending word sounds, stress and intonation. That’s the main ones, there are a lot to talk about. For example, they also get difficulty in distinguish the two pairs /ổ/ and /e/ or between /ð/ and /dʒ/ . • Teacher 6: I do not know what to talk about this because there are so many mistakes that students often make in my English lessons. The main ones may be the mistakes in producing ending word sounds, stress, and intonation. Question 3 concerns vowel problems that students here often meet. According to these ten teachers, the main vowels that were problematic for their students were the vowel pair /ổ/ and /e/. They also expressed that the students here often made mistakes between the pairs /ɒ/ and /ɔ:/, /ɪ/ and /i:/, /ǝ/ and/ɜ:/, /ʊ/ and /u:/. They complained that their students often substitute the long vowels by the short ones, except the last pair, the /ʊ/ and /u:/, the students there often have a long /u:/ substitute for the short /ʊ/. Teacher 6 also added more examples as below: -“good” is pronounced /gu:d/ -“see” is pronounced /sɪ/ -“read” is pronounced /rɪd/. Question number 4 of the interview regards to the problems students at that school often meet with English consonants. With the question “Do your students have difficulties when they learn English consonants?”, all the ten answers were “yes”. The teachers gave many mistakes that students often made with English consonants. After doing analysis from the record, I had some main conclusions as followings: The most serious problems with English consonants for the students there, according to ten interviewed teachers, are final position consonants. The students often ignored the last consonants, especially the six consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, /v/, /ð/. Many students also substitute Vietnamese consonants for some English ones such as /t/ for /θ/, /d/ for /ð/, /z/ for / dʒ/, /ʃ/ for /s/ and /f/ for /p/. Question 5 touches with students’ problems with English consonant clusters. All of the respondents agreed that their students had problems with English consonant clusters. According to these interviewees, most of the students often omit one or more consonants in a consonant cluster. The followings are some complaints about this: • Teacher 3: Oh, yes. Maybe because in our Vietnamese language does not have consonant clusters, our students often have a lot of difficulties with English consonant clusters. They often produce the pronunciation with the absence of one or even more than one consonant in a cluster. • Teacher 9: Yes, they do. I think English consonant clusters are very difficult for students because even my students can not pronounce correctly one single consonant. My students almost ignore one or two consonants in a cluster, for example, the word “ last” could be pronounced “lat”, the word “once” could be pronounced “one”. Question 6 concerns stress problems. All of the ten respondents agreed that their students often have stress problems. According to these interviewees, their students make stress mistakes very often, the followings are very nice answers: • Teacher 2: Yes, of course, most of the time. My students often give no stress to more than one syllable words, or if they do, they put the stress in an incorrect position. • Teacher 8 : Oh, yes, stress is a very serious problem in teaching English pronunciation. My students often ask me how to know where to put the stress, and you know, we have no answer, just some rules. Even some of my students do not know the concept “stress”. • Teacher 10: Yes, they do have difficulties in learning English stress. My students often give no stress to more than one syllable words. Some better ones give stress, but incorrect position. With the regards to English rhythm and intonation mistakes, question 7 was made to the respondents. The question investigated whether the students at that school had problems with English rhythm and intonation or not. Ten teachers responded that their students all had problems with English rhythm and intonation. Some of them complained that the students there did not know the importance of rhythm and intonation in expressing meanings although the teacher corrected them many times, so they often gave no rhythm and intonation. And some better students gave some rhythm and intonation, but often the falling tone whenever they spoke English. Teacher 2 and teacher 7 expressed the same opinion that because their students were so bad at English, so they often ignored correcting rhythm and intonation mistakes. Teacher 3 and teacher 9 complained that even in English textbook, there were no focus on teaching rhythm and intonation. Question 8 concerns the main reasons for these above difficulties. With this question, the respondents seem to get difficult to express their ideas although the question were given in Vietnamese. I audio taped and then found their main thoughts as followings: Most teachers thought that the main reason for this was lack of opportunity for students to practise English. They all shared a common thought that their students did not have much time to practise English. The second main reason, according to these teachers, is the influence of the mother tongue, especially the Ha Tinh accent. The students were so affected that they produced the English utterances sound like Hatinh tone. Further more, some respondents here also added that the students were very lazy in speaking English. They just studied for exams which focused much on grammar. The objectives of the exams also made them lazy in learning English pronunciation. Another negative reason that the respondents gave for students’ bad pronunciation is that teachers’ pronunciation seemed to be not good enough for them to listen. They also complained that some teachers did not pay much attention to teaching pronunciation. The teachers gave some reasons that sound reasonable. To have some recommendations for a better English pronunciation teaching, I made the ninth question to the interviewees. The question asked the interviewees what they should do to improve the situation. The following are some nice ones: • Teacher 1: I think there are many techniques to improve learners’ pronunciation such as information gap activities, matching exercises, chain stories. If we employ these techniques well, our students’ pronunciation must be improved. • Teacher 6: There are many ways to improve our students’ pronunciation. The most important one is our manner of teaching. We should encourage our students to speak English. Many of them are afraid of making mistakes when they speak English. If we can create a good atmosphere for them to speak, their language will be improved. I also think that we should employ different techniques in the lessons so that the lesson are easy to understand and interesting. • Teacher 7: The most common techniques I often use to teach individual sounds are minimal pairs, visual aids, and when I teach stress, rhythm and intonation, I use some techniques such as conducting, tapping or exaggeration. In short, from the interview, we can get some brief conclusions as followings: According to these teachers, students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School have difficulties in learning English pronunciation. The main problems, as experienced by these teachers, are word- ending sounds, stress, rhythm and intonation. The main reasons for pronunciation problems, in the teachers’ opinions, are the influence of the mother tongue, especially of the Ha Tinh accent, and the lack of opportunity to practise speaking English. The teacher here realized the problems and made some try to help their students overcome the problems when applying some techniques in pronunciation lessons. 4.1.3.Classroom observation: To support the two first instruments, the questionnaires and the interview, I also employed classroom observation to find out students’ general attitude toward learning English pronunciation and their main difficulties in learning it . During three weeks I attended five lessons including different lessons: 3 speaking lessons, two grammar ones which were randomly chosen at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School given by five different teachers. I chose not only speaking lessons but also grammar lessons to attend because not only in speaking lessons are the pronunciation problems revealed but also in grammar ones are they revealed, especially in Language Focus, there are lessons for pronunciation. However, because of technical limitation, I did not video- taped or audio- taped the lessons I attended. Further more, these instruments might cause unnatural atmosphere in the class which could also give unreliable data from my observation. That is why I decided to take notes of classroom techniques as well as pronunciation problems that the students often met as much as possible. These note-takings may not involve all the problems that supplement those which I had got from the questionnaires and interview. Among five lessons I observed, I chose two lessons to describe: Lesson Language Focus – Unit 14 and lesson Speaking – Unit 14. In Excerpt 1 (Lesson Language Focus – Unit 14), the teacher started with warm-up by asking the students to report a football match. After that, she had some volunteers to present and asked the students to vote for the best reporter. With the first part, the pronunciation part, the teacher guided her students to continue the lesson by asking the students to repeat some words that are related to the topic “football” and at the same time wrote down the words consisting the two consonants “g” and “k”. After that she read the words as a model, then she asked her students to repeat the words in chorus and individually. To move on to the second part, grammar exercises which focused on the two structures “Be going to + V” and “ Will +V”, the teacher hanged a big picture on the board and introduced the situation and a dialogue. Mary’ bicycle has a flat tyre. So she asks her father to repair it for her. Mary: Dad, my bicycle has a flat tyre. Dad: Really? Ok. I will repair it for you. Five minutes later, Mary’s mother goes out from the kitchen. Mother: Our daughter’s bicycle has a flat tyre. Dad: I have known. I am going to repair it for her. From the illustration, the teacher had the students explain the difference between the two structures “Be going to + V” and “ Will +V” and do the tasks. After that, she called some students to read out their answers to check. In Excerpt 2, (lesson Speaking – Unit 14), the teacher involved the students to the lesson by having them work in pairs talking about the football teams shown in the pictures of the 2006 World Cup with some guided questions. Task 2 was done in pairs again. During the time students did task 2, the teacher went round the class controlling and helped students to do the task, too. I also saw that sometimes she corrected students’ mistakes in pronunciation. From two Excerpts, I found out that students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School made a lot of pronunciation mistakes. The mistakes will be in more details in the following part. Further more, it was shown in the lesson that the students were not really willing to speak English, they just spoke when the teacher called them, not many students volunteered even in speaking lesson. 4.1.3.1. Student’ pronunciation problems observed: In the five lessons I observed, I did find many problems when students spoke English. The most common mistakes, the same as in the interview, was consonant endings. Most students here did not pronounce the consonants in the final positions, which can cause a lot of misunderstanding. They did a lot of word –ending omission. This is a serious 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 ha 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 ha 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 / ổ /. The sound / ổ / 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/ 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 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 wh- questions. 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. /ổ/, some consonants such as /p/, /t/,/k/, etc. , word endings, stress, rhythm and intonation. 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 do 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 / ổ /, /z/ vs. /ð/, /t/ and / θ/. The second serious problem that students often make is stress. Students pronounce most of the words that consist of two or more than two syllables with no stress. And if they give