MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HUE UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES ------------ BUI QUANG THUC AN INVESTIGATION INTO NON EFL FIRST YEAR STUDENTS’ COMMON ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION MISTAKES: A STUDY OF INTONATION AT HUE JUNIOR COLLEGE OF EDUCATION MA THESIS IN THEORY AND METHODOLOGY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Hue University of Foreign Languages HUE, 2016 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 RATIONALE Many people think that pronunciation is what makes up an accent. It may be that pronunciation is very important for an understandable accent. It is intonation that gives the final touch that makes an accent native. Intonation is the "music" of a language, and is perhaps the most important element of a good accent.
Often we hear someone speaking with perfect grammar, and perfect formation of the sounds of English but with a little something that gives them away as not being a native speaker. Intonation is very important in expressing meanings and especially in showing our feelings, for example: surprise, anger, disbelief, gratitude. When communicating, learners cannot usually show their feeling and pronounce sentences with a correct intonation, either. Studying a language requires knowledge of language, skills of language and ability to express language.
One of the most important elements to transfer speaker’s opinion is intonation which teachers and students at Hue Junior College of Education (HJCOE) may ignore. Teachers tend to teach students grammatical points and reading comprehension. Listening parts tend to be ignored, especially intonation patterns. As a teacher of English, I would like to conduct this research to give awareness to Vietnamese learners of English, especially non English major students at Hue Junior College of Education and to those who do not normally perform the intonation patterns in order to help them improve their competence of communicating efficiently with native speakers.
Therefore, it is essential to carry out an investigation into the pronunciation of English intonation experienced by the students at HJCOE.2 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY Such essential features for verbal communication as stress and intonation are those that should be paid attention to learning situations and they should be a learning process in which learners need practice and guidance to master. So it is essential for teachers and learners to have an overall understanding of what intonation is, why it is difficult for learners of foreign languages. The study is expected to contribute to the present knowledge of intonation patterns concerning cross-linguistic issues in general and problems that non EFL students at HJCOE may encounter in speaking in particular.3 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES 1.1 Aims This study aims to find out difficulties and some common English pronunciation mistakes that non-major students at Hue Junior College of Education may make. Moreover, the study also aims to provide the students with practical knowledge to improve their performance of basic intonation patterns.2 Objectives 1) Investigate HJCOE non-EFL English students’ perception towards the intonation in teaching and learning English.
2) Identify the dificulties and mistakes that HJCOE non-EFL English students may encounter when performing basic intonation patterns in their English course. 3) Identify the causes of dificulties and mistakes that HJCOE non-EFL English students may encounter when performing the basic intonation patterns with their English course.3 Research questions 1)What are first-year non-EFL English students’ perception towards intonation in learning and using English in communication? 2) What are the difficulties and common mistakes the first-year non-EFL English students at HJCOE may experience? 3)In what way can these difficulties and common mistakes in performing intonation be overcome by non-EFL English students at HJCOE? 1.4 SCOPE OF STUDY This study focused on such issues of intonation as pitch movement, and intonation unit. Especially, intonation mistakes are a priority I would like to approach. This study was conducted in HJCOE with the participation of 120 non EFL first year students.5 ORGANIZATION OF STUDY Chapter 1: Introduction.
Chapter 2: Literature Review. Chapter 3: Research Design and Methodology. Chapter 4: Results and Discussion. 2 Chapter 5: Conclusion and Implications CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 PRIOR RESEARCH The literature dealing with English intonation started very early.
In his study of English phonetics and phonology in a practical perspective, Roach (1983) presented intonation in utterances and described the form and functions of intonation in detail. Roach (1983) recognizes four types of function: attitudinal, accentual, grammatical, and discourse, though ‘accentual’ function can be integrated into ‘discourse’.2 BASIC CONCEPTS OF INTONATION 2.1 What Is Intonantion? When speaking, people generally raise and lower the pitch of their voice, forming pitch patterns. They also give some syllables in their utterances a greater degree of loudness and change their speech rhythm. These phenomena are called intonation Richard (1985).
Briefly, intonation is the variations or changes which take place in the pitch of the voice in connected speech. Pitch This is the degree of highness or lowness of the voice caused by variation in the rate of vibration of the vocal cords. When we listen to people speaking, we can hear some sounds or groups of sounds in their speech to be relatively higher or lower than others. This relative height of speech sounds as perceived by a listener is called pitch.
Pitch Range This is the scale of pitch between its lowest and highest levels. In the wide sense, it is understood as the variations in height which are used by a speaker or group of speakers in communication. Whether the pitch range used by individuals in a speech community is wide or narrow often depends on social or cultural conventions and may be a convention of a whole speech community. Tone or Pitch Movement In a wide sense, tone is the overall behavior of pitch, i., the different changes or movements the pitch can show in a syllable.
The different tones make the voice go upwards and downwards in a tone group. A unit of speech bounded by pauses has movement, of music and rhythm, associated 3 with the pitch of voice Roach (1983). This certain pattern of voice movement is called 'tone'. A tone is a certain pattern, not an arbitrary one, because it is meaningful in discourse.
By means of tones, speakers signal whether to refer, proclaim, agree, disagree, question or hesitate, or indicate completion and continuation of turn-taking, in speech. This is the change in pitch which affects the meaning and function of utterances in discourse. In English, linguists have distinguished four or five different tones: Tone 1 fall in pitch Tone 2 rise in pitch Tone 3 a slight rise in pitch Tone 4 fall in pitch followed by a rise Tone 5 rise in pitch followed by a fall 2. Tone Unit and the Components of a Tone Unit Tone unit or tone group is the sentence or part of a sentence/utterance over which a particular pitch pattern extends.
This is the basic unit of intonation in a language. A tone unit is usually divided into several parts. The most important part contains the syllable on which a change of pitch begins: the tonic syllable. The ways in which linguists have divided the tone unit into its different parts and the terms they have used for these parts are not always the same.
The simplified diagram below shows the main parts of a tone unit together with different divisions and terms which have been used. unstressed onset tonic syllable continuation syllable first where major and stressed pitch movement completion syllable begins of pitch movement Crystal (prehead) head nucleus (tail) 1969 Halliday pretonic tonic 1967, 1970 4 Brazil et (preclitic tonic segment (enclitic at, 1980 segment segment) E. That’s a VERY TALL STO ry (adapted from Richard, 1992, p. Tonic Stress and Tonic Syllable An intonation unit almost always has one peak of stress, which is called 'tonic stress', or 'nucleus'.
In a word, the syllable that receives the tonic stress is called 'tonic syllable'. Tonic stress is almost always found in a content word in utterance final position. Consider the following, in which the tonic syllable is underlined: She went to Paris.Types of Tones in English a) THE FALLING TONE b) THE HIGH RISING TONE c) THE LOW RISING TONE d) THE FALL - RISE TONE e) The RISE - FALL TONE 2.3 THE NOTATION OF INTONATION IN ENGLISH I follow Gimson and O’Conor model of notation by making use of the dots to show the unstressed and stressed syllables in the prehead and head. Also, the tonic syllable which anticipates the pitch movement of the tail can be marked with the biggest dot plus the arrow showing the direction of movements.
As reference to the model of tone unit, the syllables of the sequence can be assigned the corresponding components as follows: She went to Paris yesterday PH H (body) N T 5 CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY 3. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHOD This study is a descriptive research using both qualitative and quantitative information. With this approach, the research made use of both methods for collecting qualitative and quantitative data with diagnostic test and questionnaire. With the assumptions about the students’ situation of teaching and learning pronunciation in listening and speaking skills with the course book New Cutting Edge the study was designed to seek information to test two hypotheses about the student’s pronunciation.2 HYPOTHESES From the assumptions about the typological features of the prosody and the non EFL first year students’ situation at HJCOE, the following hypotheses are generated 1) The learners failure in performing basic intonation patterns may be due to the fact that these patterns in the coursebooks New Cutting Edge are ignored in the process of teaching English.
2) The learners incompetence in English intonation patterns may be due to the fact that learners do not pay enough attention to the learning process, particularly acquiring and training. RESEARCH STEPS 1) The first step of this research is to review relevant documents, books, and researches concerning our topic published in Vietnamese, and other languages. 2) The second step is to generate hypotheses about the mistakes and problems that HJCOE students may experience in performing English intonation. 3) The third step is to collect data from HJCOE students.
4) The data analysis is expected to yield information about mistakes and problems that are mentioned in the hypotheses. SUBJECT SELECTION AND DESCRIPTION The subjects involved in the research were 120 non EFL first-year students at Hue Junior College of Education. THE SAMPLE The recordings were administered to 20 students. The students were chosen with convenience, thus this sampling somewhat failed to maintain the coverage of students of different criteria of evaluation in each levels of learning such as quite native- accepted- unaccepted.
METHOD OF DATA COLLECTION The data was obtained using 2 measurement instruments: survey with questionnaires and diagnostic test. DATA COLLECTION The data collection was carried out on the subjects described above. The questionnaires were delivered to the students at the end of September, 2015. Also in this period of time, the diagnostic test was administered on the ground of the determined research design methodology.1 The Polderbit Sound Recorder 7 Figure 3.2 The Polderbit Sound Editor 3.
DATA ANALYSIS Data analysis was carried out using the procedure of tallying frequencies, recording the results, presenting the data in frequency and percentage distribution tables, and analyzing and interpreting the data in the light of the research objectives.3 The visual wave form and pitch contour of the utterance “Where are you from?” made by the native speaker Figure 3.4 The visual wave form and pitch contour of the utterance “Where are you from?” made by Vietnamese learner of English 3. VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY 9 CHAPTER 4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 4. Data Collected from Learners’ Questionnaires 4. Learners’ background Table 4.1 Information about learners’ background.
Participants and Information Total Percentage Town center 54 (54%) Dwelling places 100% Districts 46 (46%) Length of English 7 100% learning 4.