ABSTRACT Nowadays, English plays an important role in all areas of life, especially in international integration. An essential task of education is that English learners should communicate successfully with the target language. To do this, learners must have a deep understanding of the sound system in English language. Therefore, pronunciation skill is the most important factor.
In fact, there are still many pronunciation errors of English learners, creating language barriers that prevent them from integrating with the outside world. A large number of English major students of Thuong Mai University are also experiencing these problems. Indeed, in spite of being learned English in secondary school and in high school, many students of English Faculty at Thuong Mai University are weak at English pronunciation. This has a significant impact on their learning other subjects such as listening, speaking, reading, interpreting, etc as well as creates many restrictions in communicating with native speakers.
In this study, the author studied typical English pronunciation errors of freshmen of English Faculty at Thuong Mai University, then proposed some solutions to freshmen in particular and all students of English Faculty in general to improve their pronunciation. All data and information were collected from 50 students from 7 classes of the English Department. The findings indicate that first- year students tend to make pronunciation mistakes with vowels and consonants. However, they have not had real effective method to improve their pronunciation errors.
Therefore, the findings from the study are hopefully of benefit not only for first-year English major students at Thuong Mai University but also all students interested in the pronunciation area by raising their awareness of their own study. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT When completing this graduation paper, I would like to express my deepest and most sincere thanks to many people for their invaluable help in the process of conducting research. First and foremost, I would like to send my sincere gratitude towards my supervisor Ms. Do Thi Bich Dao, for her constructive and timely feedbacks as well as her continuous encouragement from the beginning and through the study process.
Without her help, I could not finish my graduation paper. I would love to thank all the teachers at Thuong Mai University for bringing me the world of knowledge during my course and helping me complete this important document. I would also like to send my sincerest gratitude to all first-year students who have enthusiastically participated in the study. Their participation has been important to this research.
Last but not least, I want to send my truly thanks to my family and friends for their endless love and support through the challenging time of conducting the research. Without the encouragement of them, I could not have got this far. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Y0 (0010555.scssssssssserssrsessscsscsssssccsssesscssessesserssesesesssssesesssenseees ii TABLE OF CONTENT S.cccccssssssscsssssessessesssssessscssnsssssssscsscssesssseseessenssessoeseoees iii LIST OF TABLES, FIGURES AND CHARTS LIST OF ABBREYVIA TIONGS. G0 00000 0838695885060 60 CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEW OE THE STUDY.
Pr€eVÏOUS SÍUÏ©S. Aims Of the Studly. Scope Of the Study. Procedures for data collecfion and anaÌÏySÌS.
Organization 0 (le SfUY.-5- 5c 5593055088 5695895885883885885885885688986 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2. Definition Of pronunciation. English pronuncÏafÏOn €FTOTS. What are English pronunciation ©FTOTS?.
Factors affecting English pronunciation of studenfs. English pronunciation errors made by Vietnamese learners. 19 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH EINDINGS. Result from survey qu€SfÏOTIAÌÏF€.
Background information about students’ English pronunciation skill. Student’s difficulties in English pronunciation learning. What are strategies do you use when you practice English pronunciatÏOI\?. so HH nung 31 3.
Result from personall ÏNI{€TVÏCW. c5 ĂcĂ s0 93 95 951651851836658856858850050856 33 CHAPTER 4: RECOMMENDATION AND SUGGESTIONS.1 Major findings of fle sfudy.2 Suggestions for the Improvement of the Pronunciation Errors. Limitation of the study and suggestions for further research. 39 REFERENCES APPENDIX iv LIST OF TABLES, FIGURES AND CHARTS > List of tables Table 1.
Participants from seven classes Table 3.1 Student’s English background information Table 3.2 Student’s used method and program in learning English pronunciation skill Table 3.3 The efficiency of students’ method /program in improving English pronunciation > List of figures Figure 2.1 Places of articulation (Roach, 1983: 8) Figure 2.2 Primary cardinal vowels Figure 2.3 Chart of English Consonant Phonemes > List of charts Chart 3.1 Factors affecting student’s English pronunciaf1on.2 Student's difficulties in English pronunc1af1On.4 The vowel and consonant sounds that students often make mistakes.3 Methods used to improve English pronunciation skiÏÏ.5 The efficiency of used learning methods to improve pronunciation skills OỂ SfU€TIES. 2G Q01 112111 1111111 110111011 0111011 11 1H TH v1 33 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS EU: European Union EFL: English as a Foreign Language ESL: English as a Second Language TMU: Thuong Mai University VPM: Voices, Place and Manner RP: Received Pronunciation N, V, A: Noun, Verb, Adjective vi CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY 1. Rationale Nowadays, English has become the global language. Among hundreds of different languages, the world has chosen English as a mean for people to understand each other.
English is the official language of 53 countries and territories, the official language of the EU and the third widely used language after Chinese and Spanish. The international events like the Olympics, global organizations, and multinational companies consider English as common language of communication. Vietnam is also one of the countries which use English as the second language. Therefore, English plays an important role in Education sector as one of the main subjects in many schools in Vietnam.
This shows the importance of English in all fields of economy, culture, society, etc. However, a sad fact that Vietnamese young people are learning English as a formal subject at school but almost still express to be lack self when communicating with foreigners. Many students after graduation still cannot speak more than simple sentence such as greetings and introduce themselves. The reason is that they cannot pronounce English words correctly which discourages them from talking and communication.
To master a language is not easy at all. We often hear about four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing in English but forgetting that pronunciation is also one of the important skills. If learners want to listen to English well, they must first say it correctly and pronounce it correctly. That requires a knowledge system of vocabulary and the process of practicing pronunciation, word and sentence stress.
If learners pronounce one word wrongly, when they hear the native speakers say that word, they cannot understand it because they may find the word very strange, not recognizing it and as a result English learners do not understand the whole sentence. Besides, if learners speak wrongly, native speakers cannot understand what they are saying or cause misunderstandings. At Thuong Mai University, most of first-year English major students still have many mistakes in pronunciation. If English learners want to communicate fluently, English learners have to repair pronunciation mistake as soon as possible, especially at the first year at university.
There are many pronunciation errors that learners make such as words and sentence stress, intonation, linking sound, length of vowel sounds, ending sounds etc. This is one of the most disturbing things for students pursuing an English-related career in the future if there is no method to change and overcome. From the reasons mentioned above, to improve student’s pronunciation, the researcher has decided to carry out the study entitled "Some typical pronunciation errors made by first-year English major students at Thuong Mai University". Previous studies Prior to the 1980s, the pronunciation field was less interested not only in language teaching at schools, but also in the found literature.
There were not much researches about pronunciation errors. According to Brown (1991), among 1420 articles in four leading English teaching journals, only 95 of them investigated pronunciation. In other words, between 1975 and 1988, the rate of the articles related to pronunciation is only 7. After 1980 and onward, people began to pay attention to communication methods and the pronunciation prerequisite skill has been made as the “Intelligible pronunciation is an essential component of communicative competence” (Morley, 1991).
Because of that, many researchers started to find out about different issues such as the influence of the factors on second language acquisition of pronunciation (Moyer, 1999; Thompson, 1991; Flege, Munro, & MacKay, 1995). When the researchers learned about the segmental aspects which are consonants and vowels, they have realized the importance of the suprasegmental features such as stress, rhythm, intonation to maintain the healthy conversations (Celce-Murcia et al. Finally, the study has been conducted with a pragmatic aim. These researches were made to investigate the pronunciation errors of the EFL learners so as to describe the current situations of the students in terms of pronunciation development, to define what extent the curriculum serves the aim of pronunciation teaching with the chosen documents like coursebooks.
Thank for these studies, it is easier for teachers in preventing these errors from becoming fossilized errors and designing the lessons according to the needs of the learners (Hojati, 2013; Kagmaz, 1993; Hismanoðlu, 2011; Tergujeff, 2012; Gordani & Khajavi, 2012). The research about “Teaching English Intonation to ESL/EFL Students”, Mehmet Celik, (2001), Hacettepe University, Turkey put forward a framework of English intonation as a second of foreign language to non- native speakers of English. That English intonation framework should include four main characteristics of intonation: intonation units, stress, tone and pitch range. Therefore, the phenomena of intonation in English should have a part of utterance, intonation unit, as a basis for studying all kinds of movements and features of the voice.
Each intonation unit has a type of tonic stress: (unmarked) utterance-final tonic stress, or emphatic, or contrastive, or new information stress, the last of which is more frequently used in utterances given to wh-questions. Moreover, intonation units often have one of these tones: low-rise, high-rise, fall and fall-rise. Tones are assigned to intonation units related to the type of voice movement on syllables. Finally, all intonation units must be said in one of three levels: high, mid and low.
Although this framework may be ratified to be useful and feasible for pronunciation practitioners in the field of ESL/EFL (English as a Second Language/ English as a Foreign Language), it seems to be rather general and theoretical. In order to pronounce perfectly, English learners need to focus on many different aspects such as intonation, stress, vowel, consonant, ending sounds, link word, etc. Besides, an equally important thing is how to present the pronunciation way of vowels and consonants because they seem to be the basic things in pronunciation learning processing. Aims of the study Initially, the researcher wants to find out the most common pronunciation errors made by first- year English major students of TMU.
Secondly, the researcher desires to draw out an appreciate approach to help improve the English pronunciation skill of English learners in general and first-year English major students of TMU in particular. More specifically, the study is an attempt to answer the two research questions: - What are typical pronunciation errors that first-year English major students of TMU often make? - What are methods for first- year English major students to overcome English pronunciation errors? 1. Research Subjects Firstly, the aim of the researcher is to find out the typical pronunciation errors of first-year English major students at TMU, thus only first-year students of English faculty at TMU would be the main research subjects of the study. Most of the freshmen are in rural areas from different provinces.
Therefore, their pronunciation is greatly influenced by the local language, especially students in Nghe An, Ha Tinh, Quang Binh, Quang Ngai, etc. In addition, the process of learning English at high schools of these students mainly focuses on grammar for exam preparation, not investing time to practice pronunciation skills and speaking skills. Besides, the teaching method at the university is different from the teaching method at high school. If in high school, the students are dedicated by the teachers to instruct step by step, in the university environment, students must be more self-aware in learning with the guidance of teachers.