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

Chapter I: Introduction
1.1. Rationale:
Nowadays, the development of science, technology and economy and the tendency of
globalization have brought about a great demand of intercommunicating. In order to meet
this demand, English has become an international language and a very important and
compulsory subjects at schools. As a result, teaching English has become a compulsory
subject at schools for many years. And nowadays, it has become more important because in
the past, students had to learn English, but they did not have to take English exams in
Secondary School Graduation exams. However nowadays, students have to take them. In
traditional teaching, students were required to acquire English grammar nowadays they are
required to acquired various skills and language items including English grammar, English
vocabulary and English pronunciation. In the light of Communicative Language Teaching
(CLT), students are required not only to have good knowledge of vocabulary and eligible
grammar, the four language skills but also correct pronunciation. Accurate pronunciation is a
must in English learning for students. Therefore, learning English pronunciation is of great
importance to students, even for their exams. In addition, this will help them to have a good
job in their future and enable them to communicate with foreigners successfully if they have
a chance and the need.
Despite realizing this importance, Vietnamese students still can not acquire correct
English pronunciation. The main reason is that the traditional teaching laid the emphasis on
grammar has led to this problem. Many students can not pronounce English words and
sentences correctly. They often pronounce them with equal stress, flat intonation and no
rhythm at all. English pronunciation seems has become the most serious problem that
students meet when they learn English. This is happening at almost upper secondary schools
in Vietnam except for foreign language specializing schools.
Situated in a mountainous area in Huong Khe district, Ha Tinh province, Phuc Trach
Upper Secondary School is far weaker than other schools in terms of learning different
school subjects, of which English language teaching seems to be the worst. And if some
students are said to be good at English, it means they are good at English grammar. Most of
them find it hard to express themselves orally. If anyone can, he has problems in
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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.
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- To offer some recommendations.
1.3. The research questions:
With the aims stated above, I proposed two following questions for the study:
a. What are their main difficulties in learning English pronunciation?
b. What are the causes of these difficulties?
1.4 Research Methodology:
The study was conducted as a case study.
The research began with a literature review in different theoretical issues related to
teaching English pronunciation . After the literature review, to gain the aims with high
reliability, the researcher employed different methods of a case study. They are observation,
questionnaires and interviews. These methods were used to collect data from students and
teachers at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School in Ha Tinh with the intention of addressing
the aims of the study.
+ Classroom observation was employed to see what the main English pronunciation
problems were. I observed five different lessons which were given by four teachers selected
randomly including three speaking lessons and two Language focus ones. Each of these
teachers presented an English lesson in a 45 minute period. Classroom observation was also
used to observe students’ attitude towards English pronunciation.
+ Questionnaire instrument was designed to investigate students’ attitude towards
learning English as well as English pronunciation and their main difficulties. There were ten
questions in the questionnaire, the first three questions were aimed at finding out students’
attitude towards learning English speaking in general and towards learning English
pronunciation in particular. The seven questions left were employed to find out whether they
had difficulties in learning English pronunciation or not and what difficulties were as
experienced by the students. All the questions in the questionnaire involved closed and
open-ended questions with the intention of getting deep and reliable data. After collecting
the data from the questionnaires, I analyzed the data qualitatively and quantitatively.
+ The last method – interviewing teachers at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School was to get
deeper and clearer insights into students’ difficulties in learning pronunciation. This step was
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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 11
th
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.
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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.
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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

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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
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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
8
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
9
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
10
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
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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 h¶, hö, ¸, ¹, etc. to make a question, or some particles such as «i, èi, ¸,
qu¸, thËt, lµm 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:
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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
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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:n
ɪ
vəsə
ti/, /mp
ɪ
/ and / a
ʊ
ə/ ) 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
14
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 /rǝʊmæntɪk/
- day /dei/
- a lternative /ɔ:ltɜ:nǝtɪv/
In English, the alphabet “a” can be pronounced in many different ways such as /a:/, /
æ/, /ei/ , /ǝ/ and /ɔ:/, or the letter “u” can be pronounced into /ʊ/, /ju:/, /e/ (bury), /ʌ/, etc.
In short, there are many differences between the two language sound systems 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.
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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. /æ/ as in “bed” and “ bad”
/Λ/ vs. /a/ as in “cut” and “car”.

Students often make great confusion of these above pairs of vowels. Some 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
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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.
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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,
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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. /æ, /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
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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
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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.
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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:
a. Do students in Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School have difficulties in learning
English pronunciation?
22
b. What are their main difficulties as perspected by the students?
c. What may be the causes of these difficulties?
With these three research questions, the study will investigate secondary 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.
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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.
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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
11
th
who have been learning English for five years. I chose these grade 11
th
students to be
the participants of the study because, firstly, they have two years of working with the new
textbook meanwhile the 10
th
grade students have only nearly one year and the 12

th
grade
ones have no year working with the new textbook which emphasizes much on pronunciation
than the old text book. So the 11
th
grade students also have more time to deal with learning
pronunciation. Further more, the 11
th
grade students also have more time to help me get the
data meanwhile the 12
th
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
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