An action research on the use of continuous feedback to improve the first year students' pronunciation at the english department, college of foreign languages, vietnam national university, hanoi

5% of the students said that they were allowed to listen to authentic English in the class during the time they did listening tasks. Anyway, this was still a very low percentage. As this problem had been foreseen due to the researcher’ awareness of the lack of facilities in many schools, which made it impossible for Vietnamese teachers to provide their students with opportunities to deal with real-life English, question 6 was asked, “How do you judge the pronunciation of your Vietnamese teachers of English at your secondary school?” When asking students this question, the researcher was fully aware that the answers would be largely objective. Firstly, the students actually had not been trained on how to judge the pronunciation of other people, which criteria they should pay attention to. Secondly, the students themselves are not native speakers of English. How could they judge others’ pronunciation whereas that of themselves is still very low? Nevertheless, the researcher still wanted to raise the question to investigate the subjects’ overall judgment over those who had taught them English. After some periods studying at university, the subjects had got some access to authentic English. Thus, to some extend, they could still make comparison between that authentic English with what they often heard when they studied at secondary school, although the comparison is limited. To the researcher’s surprise, only 25% of the students said that their teachers’ English pronunciation was good, which came largely from the students who followed the seven-year English curriculum, whereas the same percentage judged their secondary school teachers’ pronunciation as “poor”. Half of the students chose “average”. As mentioned before, even though the students’ assessment could not be totally reliable as a trusted source, this was still a big question. The seventh question went straight forward to the subject matter of the research. The researcher would like to find out how much time was devoted to the teaching of pronunciation at the students’ secondary schools. As can be seen from the data, pronunciation was formally taught for only 25% of the students. There was no official lesson on pronunciation for the rest of the students, as 75% of the students said that the pronunciation of new words were taught during the teaching of other parts, like grammar or reading. In other words, the teacher taught the pronunciation of English vocabulary in connection with other aspects of English. This was not troublesome provided the teacher treated it seriously and provided corrective feedback to the students extensively. However, it was reported that pronunciation was not the focus during the lesson as well as during the teaching of other aspects in English. Therefore, we could come to a conclusion that English pronunciation was not given adequate attention during its teaching at secondary schools. Beside those objective factors, subjective factor should also be taken into consideration. That was the reason why question 8 was asked to investigate the way students learnt new English vocabulary. More specifically, the question was aimed at finding how students used English dictionaries when they looked up the meanings of new words. Table 6: Students’ habit of looking up new words in the dictionaries A B C Question 8 55% 20% 25% The data reveals a big problem concerning the way students often learnt English new words at secondary schools. It seems that the most important aspect that they pay attention to was the meaning of the new words. 55% of the students claimed that when they needed to look for the meaning of a specific English word, they would open the dictionary, find the word and then write on a single sheet of paper the word in English and its equivalent in Vietnamese. They did not care about the pronunciation of the word. Among the 45% of the students who did pay attention to pronunciation when looking up new words in the dictionary, only 25% pronounced the words aloud. The rest only pronounced the word “in mind”. This is troublesome because when a student looks at the phonetic symbol of a word, s/he may think that it is easy to pronounce it. However, only when s/he really speaks it out does s/he find out how difficult it is. Question 9 -10: Students’ attitude towards pronunciation and their problems with English pronunciation. The last two questions were asked to find out students’ attitude towards English pronunciation, as well as some factors that may have an effect on their pronunciation performance pointed out by the students themselves. The answers to the questions were presented as follows. Table 7: Students’ attitude towards pronunciation and their problems with English pronunciation A B C D E Question 9 0% 100% Question 10 35% 20% 20% 65% 60% As for question 9, all students claimed that in their opinion, English pronunciation was important and they all wanted to master it. Later, when being asked to justify their choice, the students said that it would help them feel much more confident when they knew that they had good pronunciation of English. Furthermore, this also added to their English fluency because they wouldn’t have to spend lots of time thinking of the correct pronunciation of a word in mind. Some students also expressed the thought that they felt much better and more motivated to use English when they could speak “like native speakers”. The last question aimed at finding students’ possible explanations for their weak pronunciation performance. 35% of the students said that one of the problems with their learning of English pronunciation is that there are some sounds and phonetic rules that do not exist in Vietnamese. For example, there are many consonant sounds which they do not know how to pronounce such as /t∫/ or /θ/. In addition, English is different from Vietnamese in a number of aspects, such as linking sounds, elision, etc. Students also found it hard to master the use of stress patterns and they seemed to put the stress on the first syllable, or the last one. As for intonation, this is a big problem because it is badly affected by the students’ lack of understanding. Most students had a vague understanding about the intonation curve for each kind of sentences. In addition, the students made a lot of hesitation during their speech because they were unable to express their opinion smoothly. As a result, they cannot achieve a satisfactory intonation pattern. 20% of the students said that their local dialects had a negative impact on their pronunciation performance. Some students tended to pronounce the sound /n/ as /l/. They were from Hai Phong and Nam Dinh – the northern provinces of Vietnam. It is the fact that many people from those areas have a tendency to replace /n/ by /l/ in their daily life. Thus, these students made the same mistakes when they speak Vietnamese. Another typical feature was that the accent of students who came from the central provinces of Vietnam tended to be negatively influenced by their local dialects. Therefore, it was sometimes difficult to comprehend their messages. 20% of the students claimed that their phonetic ability was not good enough to be able to pronoun English sounds. When the teacher asked the students to speak some English sentences, she found out that this choice came from those who could not pronounce the sound /l/. Besides, there were some other cases in which the students could not pronounce the sound /r/ and /dʒ/ respectively. For one student, every /r/ sound was replaced by near-/l/, which made it very difficult for the listener to figure out what she was talking about. Other students could not pronounce the sound /dʒ/. Among them, one claimed that she could not say such Vietnamese words as ‘gieo’, ‘gió’. The majority of the students (65%) chose the fourth option: “No one corrects my pronunciation for me.” These students claimed that they knew for certain that there existed some problems concerning their pronunciation. However, no one pointed it out for them. In English classes at their secondary schools, what the teacher tended to focus on were grammar and knowledge of English. Therefore, they did not receive enough feedback from the teachers on how good their pronunciation was. Furthermore, at secondary schools, they had little chance to make a full presentation in English. The only time when the teacher called them to stand up was normally to correct grammatical exercises, or to translate a certain sentence from Vietnamese into English or vice versa. That was the reason why the teacher could not have an overall judgment over the students’ pronunciation problems. Even though the students did point out that their teachers gave feedback on certain aspects of pronunciation, this mainly referred to the pronunciation of single English sounds rather than continuous speech. Another problem that students thought prevented them from achieving good English pronunciation was the fact that they had no one to practise speaking with. The students rarely used English to talk with their friends during the time at classes, except for the time when they were asked to do certain speaking tasks in the book. However, the amount of time devoted to it was very limited. Apart from the class time, the students hardly spoke English any more. Unlike in a hostel of a university where there are many other students studying English, these secondary school students would come home after class, and there was no one in their family with whom they could practise English. That is one of the crucial reasons why the students failed to realize their pronunciation problem. 4.2 Students’ problems with English consonant sounds In order to justify the effectiveness of the research, the researcher audio-recorded two mock speaking tests provided at the beginning and at the end of the research program. Each mock speaking test consisted of two parts: - A passage for each student to read aloud - A discussion which students have to work in pairs to do It can be easily recognized that “reading aloud” is different from “discussion” because when the students read a passage, they are more aware of the pronunciation of the words. Besides, they do not have to find words or phrases to express their opinion. Thus, it was expected that the students’ pronunciation in the first part would be better than in the second part of the test, when they needed to use their own knowledge and language skills to indicate what they mean. Therefore, despite the fact that the researcher made use of the speaking test, she only took the second part, which was the discussion between two students, to yield any conclusion about the students’ pronunciation. Based on the data collected in the first mock speaking test, we counted the number of students that mispronounced certain English consonant sounds. After that, we made a list of English consonant sounds that caused the most trouble for the students. Then, they were sequenced them in the order of those which were “most frequently” mispronounced to those which were “less frequently” mispronounced. The results were as follows: Chart 1: English consonant sounds that the students mispronounced As can be seen, the students mispronounced about half of the English consonant sounds. A further description of how they mispronounced the sounds was presented as follows. First and foremost, it is clear that most students had problems with palato-alveolar fricatives. 90% of the students mispronounced /∫/, and some mispronounced /ʒ/. The subjects did not put enough strength in producing /∫/. In addition, their mouths were not rounded enough to make a full production of it. Therefore, the friction of the sound was very weak. The students substituted this sound with the fricative /s/. Similarly, as for the sound /ʒ/, students tended to replace it with the fricative /z/, or the Vietnamese sound “d”. In short, the students often pronounced these two sounds like the way they pronounce Vietnamese sounds. As for /ʒ/, the substitute was the Vietnamese sound “d” (as in da, dang), whereas the Vietnamese sound /s/ (as in sung, sim) was used instead of /∫/. The second group of sounds that most students mispronounced was dental consonants /θ/ and /ð/, with 65% and 25% of the students mispronouncing respectively. The sound /θ/ was mispronounced in a number of ways. Some students substituted it with the Vietnamese sound “th” (as theo, thai). Others made the sound an alveolar plosive one, which was formed somehow like the English sounds of /t/ and /d/. As for /ð/, some subjects pronounced it like the Vietnamese sound of “gi” (as gieo, gio), whereas others use the English sound /z/ to replace it. Another group of sounds that caused problems for the students was palato-alveolar affricates /t∫/ and /dʒ/. As for the sound /t∫/, 45% of the students substituted it with the sound “ch” in Vietnamese like chum, chung. 15% of the students pronounced the sound /dʒ/ like the sound /ʒ/ or /d/. Generally, the students did not know how to raise the tongue to an appropriate height, and their lips were not full enough to form these two sounds. Apart from those problems, a minority of the students mispronounced other English sounds. 15% of the students mispronounced English voiceless plosive sounds /t/, /p/, /k/. They did not pronounce these sounds with all of their characteristics. Instead, they made them become “voiced” sounds, like the sounds /p/, /t/, /k/ in Vietnamese. In addition, 10% of the students could not pronounce the sound /n/ but replaced it with /l/. Surprisingly, one student (accounting for 5%) was unable to pronounce /r/ and substituted it with /l/. In sum, students tended to mispronounce English sounds that do not exist in Vietnamese. Apart from that, some students’ mispronunciation was due to their personal background, such as their birthplaces, or their phonetic ability. 4.3 Comparison of the students’ pronunciation performance in the pretest and the posttest At the end of the research, we conducted another mock speaking test to see whether the students had made any improvement regarding their pronunciation of different English consonant sounds. The comparison between the students’ pronunciation in the pretest and posttest was shown in the following chart. Chart 2: Comparison of the students’ pronunciation performance in the pretest and the posttest Note: Pre: The percentage of students who mispronounced the sound in the pretest Post 1: The percentage of students who did not mispronounced the sound in the posttest Post 2: The percentage of students who sometimes mispronounced the sound in the posttest Post 3: The percentage of students who still mispronounced the sound in the posttest As can be seen from the chart, while some students made complete improvement regarding certain sounds, i.e. they did not mispronounce the sounds that they used to mispronounce, others still sometimes made the same mistake as they did at the first mock speaking test. Besides, there were some students who seemed to make no progress at all. The data showed that the majority of the students did not manage to correct all the English consonant sounds that they used to mispronounce. Generally, if one student mispronounced four or five consonant sounds, after the research, she still mispronounced one or two of these sounds. It was interesting to find out that the students seemed to make more progress for the sounds that the majority of them mispronounced rather than the sounds mispronounced by the minority. When we counted the number of students who made complete or partly improvement regarding their pronunciation of the first four sounds /∫/, /t∫/, /θ/ and /ð/, it accounted for more than 50% among those who had mispronounced the sound in the pretest. Among the consonant sounds, the sound /∫/ was the most difficult one for the students. After the research, only 25% of the students could make a complete improvement. 45% of the students still made mistakes sometimes. Further analysis found out that among the letters that often represent the sound /∫/, the students were easiest at recognizing the letter “sh”. Therefore, they tended to pronounce such words like “should”, “share” correctly. On the other hand, with words bearing the letter “t” or “s” whose pronunciation is /∫/ like “sugar”, “introduction”, “impression”, it was more difficult for the students to realize that they must use the sound /∫/. As for the next three sounds /θ/, /t∫/, and /ð/, the percentage of students who could not make progress was still significant, accounting for 25%, 15% and 10% respectively (among 65%, 45% and 25% of the students who mispronounced the sounds respectively). These students still made the same mistakes when pronouncing the three sounds. However, the feature that seemed to be most troublesome was the fact that students seemed to make no significant improvement regarding the rest of the English consonant sounds, namely /dʒ/,/ʒ/, /p/, /t/, /k/, /n/ and /r/. No complete improvement was made, whereas the number of students who still mispronounced the two sounds /n/ and /r/ remained the same, standing at 10% and 5% respectively. In sum, the findings showed that the progress that the students made was quite significant regarding the sounds that the majority of the students mispronounced. Nevertheless, they made less improvement for the sounds that were “less frequently” mispronounced. Possible explanation for this could be found in the discussion of the findings, which would be presented in the next chapter. CHAPTER FIVE: DISCUSSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS 5.1 Discussion of research questions 5.1.1 What are the possible reasons that lead to students’ weak pronunciation of English? According to the findings of the questionnaire distributed to the students and the later interviews with individual student, the researcher could come to some justification for the students’ weak pronunciation of English. It can be seen clearly that most of the reasons were subjective ones. As most of the subjects had followed the three-year English curriculum at secondary schools, they lacked proper language input. At their English classes, they had little chance to deal with real-life English, with only 35% of the subjects listened to authentic English for 20-45 minutes per week. The main source of language input regarding English pronunciation was the Vietnamese teachers. However, with 50% of the subjects judged the pronunciation of their Vietnamese teachers as “average”, and 25% said their teachers had “poor English pronunciation”, this was a big problem. Actually, the pronunciation of Vietnamese teachers who are teaching English was very questionable. How could we require the students to have good English pronunciation whereas they were taught by those whose English were not good enough? Other trouble some issues also rooted from the language curricula that the students followed at secondary schools, which was the lack of feedback and practice. As communicative competence was not the main focus of both the seven-year English curriculum and the three-year English curriculum, pronunciation received little attention from the teachers. Even though the student could realize that they certainly mispronounced some English sounds, for example, they had no one to correct their mistakes. In addition, the students hardly had little opportunity to speak English, which gradually led to their weak speaking skills in general and pronunciation in particular. Unlike other language skills such as reading and listening, when the students could study by themselves and check how good they were by looking at the keys, it seemed to be impossible for the students to practise speaking alone. Another subjective factor that inhibits the students’ pronunciation of English was the fact that English share few similarities with Vietnamese. 35% of the students claimed that they found English pronunciation difficult because there are many sounds and phonetic rules that do not exist in Vietnamese. Investigation into the components of English and Vietnamese reveals that this is completely true. For example, whereas English consists of a great number of plosive sounds, these sounds are rare in Vietnamese. In addition, such English concepts as word stress, sentence rhythm, or intonation are totally strange to Vietnamese learners. This, combined with the lack of proper language input of the target language, caused lots of problems to the students. Last but not least, regarding subjective factors, local dialect also had an impact on the students’ English pronunciation. Actually, the local dialect not only inhibit the students’ success in their English pronunciation, but in their pronunciation of Vietnamese as well. For example, many people in Hải Phòng and Nam Định Province of Vietnam mispronounce the Vietnamese sound /n/ as /l/, whereas those coming from central provinces have a different language accent. Even though this factor did not affect a significant number of the students, we think it was one of the most problematic problem because it will take the students a very long time to correct the mistakes, as they have been used to this dialect for a long time. Apart from those subjective factors, objective factors also contributed to the students’ weak pronunciation. Firstly, the students’ habit of looking up new words in dictionaries was troublesome. We all know that a good English dictionary is a vital tool for any learner of English, provided that the learners pay attention to every piece of information provided in it. However, most students seemed to ignore the words’ pronunciation in the dictionary. This came from the fact that during the time the students studied at secondary schools, English pronunciation was not a focus in English classes. Therefore, the students found it unnecessary to master it. Furthermore, some students were unable to interpret certain phonetic symbols. For English words that consist of many syllables, the students find them very complicated. Thus, they decided to skip this information. Moreover, some students have problems with their phonetic ability. In this research, one student could not produce the English sound /dʒ/. However, she was also unable to pronounce the Vietnamese sound “gi”. Another student could not make the sound /r/ even in Vietnamese. In fact, this may be because even Vietnamese people hardly pronounce these two sounds with all of their characteristics. As for the sound “gi”, we often substitute it with the sound /d/, whereas the sound /r/ is also mispronounced as /d/. Nevertheless, in English, these two sounds must be pronounced clearly and they are significantly different from other sounds such as /d/ or /l/. These findings support previous studies of other researchers presented in the literature review, who claimed that the students’ pronunciation of a second foreign language was affected by a number of factors, namely the native language, the amount of exposure, the phonetic ability, and teacher’s role. Fortunately, despite the fact that the students’ pronunciation was weak, they all seemed to have a very positive attitude towards the mastery of English pronunciation. They said that good pronunciation of English brought them a great sense of satisfaction, motivation as well as confidence. These are actually the decisive factors to success in the process of learning and acquiring anything, and English pronunciation in particular. 5.1.2 What are the students’ most common problems regarding English consonant sounds? The findings showed that most students mispronounced English sounds that do not exist in Vietnamese. This reinforced the researcher’s opinion about English pronunciation of Vietnamese students before she conducted the research. More specifically, students made lots of mistakes regarding palato-alveolar fricatives, dental consonants, palato-alveolar affricates, and voiceless plosive sounds. Why couldn’t the students pronounce those sounds correctly? The problem lies in the fact that the students were largely affected by their mother tongue. This was backed up by a number of researchers, who claimed that learners’ acquisition of L2 is strongly influenced by their mother tongue (O’Connor, 1991; Ohata, 2003). Generally, students have to take more effort to pronounce English sounds than Vietnamese sounds. Many English consonant sounds required a certain amount of strength for the full pronunciation of them. For example, in order to pronounce the sounds /t∫/ and /∫/, the students have to put more strength than the sounds “tr” and “s” in Vietnamese. Furthermore, the formation of English sounds was often longer than Vietnamese sounds. For example, students have to spend a longer time forming the sound /∫/ in English than the sound “s” in Vietnamese. Another interesting finding was that also some English sounds share lots of characteristics, some students were able to pronounce one sound, but mispronounced others. For example, the sounds /ʒ/ and /∫/ are both palato-alveolar fricative. Nevertheless, 90% of the students mispronounced /∫/, whereas only 15% mispronounced /ʒ/. Similarly, 45% of the students mispronounced /t∫/, whereas only 15% of the students mispronounced /dʒ/, despite the fact that they were both palato-alveolar affricates. Therefore, it may be concluded that students tended to mispronounce voiceless sounds more than voiced ones. This was proved to be true due to the fact that many students also mispronounced voiceless sounds of /p/, /t/, /k/. As the students were unable to pronounce those sounds correctly, they tended to substitute them with Vietnamese sounds whose pronunciation seemed to be familiar, such as “s” for /∫/, “tr” for /t∫/. This way of substituting sounds has been mentioned earlier in Tench (1981), who claimed that “L2 learners often use a more familiar sound in their first language to replace the L2 sound that they perceive as difficult.” (Tench, 1981: 26). Apart from those sounds, two students mispronounced alveolar lateral /l/ and one student mispronounced palato-alveolar approximant /r/, despite the fact that these sounds also exist in Vietnamese. However, they made the same mistakes when they speak Vietnamese. Therefore, this was the problem with their phonetic ability. When we look back at the explanations for the students’ low competence of English pronunciation, this should not be treated as a surprise due to the lack of language input for the students at their secondary schools. Apparently, regarding the sounds that do not exist in Vietnamese, the only way that can help students have proper pronunciation was to provide as much authentic input as possible. Only by that way can they have a full picture of how those sounds are formed, which help them form correct sounds. However, this did not take place at their secondary schools. Thus, it is easy to understand why the Vietnamese students have weak pronunciation of English consonant sounds. 5.1.3 Can continuous feedback improve students’ English pronunciation? If yes, to what extend? One point that must be made clear before further discussion of the findings is that the “improvement” here only refers to the improvement of the way students pronounced English consonant sounds, not every aspect of English pronunciation. This, nevertheless, apparently contributes to the improvement of their overall pronunciation. As presented before, it was a bit surprising that students made more progress regarding the sounds that most of them mispronounced than the sounds that was mispronounced by few students. However, when we looked back at the research program, we can see the justification for this. With her experience, the researcher had been fully aware that some consonant sounds were mispronounced more frequently than others. That was the reason why she decided to teach those sounds first, and the sounds that were less frequently were taught later. Despite the fact that there was a focus for each pronunciation period, the researcher also regularly provided the students with a revision over the sounds that they had learnt before. Therefore, students spent more time practicing the sounds that they most mispronounced than other sounds. Among the sounds, the students made most progress with the sound /∫/ and /t∫/. Later interview with the students showed that this was due to the fact that they are somehow “familiar” with the students because in Vietnamese, we have the sounds “s” and “tr”. The only difference between the English and the Vietnamese sounds are that the former are palato-alveolar whereas the latter are alveolar. Thus, students found it easier to articulate the sounds. Despite the fact that only 25% of the students made mistakes with the sound /ð/, their progress was very low. This is because the sound /ð/ is a familiar sound to the students and they have been using this sound a lot since they began studying English. This sound exists in such word as the, this, that, those, these, which are very commonly used. Thus, once the students mispronounced this sound right from the beginning and this was not corrected for many years, it became fossilized and the students seemed to be unable to correct it at later phases. As for the two sounds of /dʒ/ and /ʒ/, the progress was also not significant. Among those who mispronounced these two sounds, none could correct the mistakes completely. This came from the fact that although the students had been trained on the pronunciation of these sounds, they did not use those sounds regularly in their English lessons. As a result, after some time, they seemed to forget about the mispronunciation. In contrast, with the sounds /p/, /t/ and /k/, the explanation seemed to be contradicted. The students still mispronounced those sounds because they used these sounds a lot in their English lesson, especially when they discussed in pairs or groups, and when they made presentations. At first, they paid attention to the sounds and tried to pronounce them correctly. However, after some time, they seemed to focus on how to express their ideas, i.e. the content of their speech. Thus, their focus shifted from accuracy to fluency. By this time, they were not aware that they failed to pronounce those sounds correctly. As for the last two sounds /n/ and /r/, no improvement was made. For the students who mispronounced the sound /n/, they claimed that the time they were trained in the English class was too short to make a significant change to the way they used to pronounce the sound /n/. As the students also make the same mistake when they speak Vietnamese in daily communication, it is very difficult for them to slow down their speed of speaking to pay more attention so as to pronounce the correct sound. For the student who mispronounced /r/, she also mispronounced many other sounds, including /dʒ/, /∫/ and /t∫/. Thus, she claimed that she could not pay attention to the sound /r/ whereas she needed to improve other sounds as well. In sum, despite the fact that there were still some remaining problems, on overall, students made progress in their pronunciation after they participated in the research. The most significant improvement was made regarding the pronunciation of English consonant sounds that were most mispronounced. Therefore, it could be concluded that the research was successful. 5.2 Pedagogical implications The use of continuous feedback has proved to be effective in improving Vietnamese students’ pronunciation of English regarding its consonant sounds. From the discussions above, a number of implications can be made. 5.2.1 Increasing the amount of feedback to students * Increasing the amount of corrective feedback A close investigation has shown that the amount of feedback that students received from the teacher was very limited. Therefore, it is highly recommended that teachers of English should pay more attention to the students’ pronunciation when they teach different language skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing. The teachers should be alert to create more opportunities for students to speak English correctly, rather than focusing mainly on the content of their speech. As for the teaching of speaking skills, the teacher should create more opportunities for students to involve in pair work and group work. During the time the students work in pairs or groups, s/he should move around and identify the pronunciation problems of the students in general, and their mispronunciation of English sounds in particular. Then, s/he should draw the attention from the whole class to the pronunciation mistakes that most of the students make. Some drilling exercises should be given, if necessary, so that all students are fully aware of their mistakes. * Increasing the amount of delayed auditory feedback Delayed auditory feedback was intensively used out-of-class time during the research program. It has proved to be very effective in the way that the students could see how they mispronounced certain English sounds. However, in the research, it was done only between the researcher and one student. It would be more beneficial if this kind of feedback is better employed. Ideally, each teacher should have a recorder to record the students’ discussions or presentations. Their voice can be played back for the whole class to listen to. In this way, the students will pay more attention to their accuracy of English while speaking. In addition, the students in the class will have a vivid example of how they make mistakes regarding English pronunciation in general and English sounds in particular. However, as it can be seen that feedback alone did not lead to significant improvement of the students’ English pronunciation, the increased provision of feedback should go along with a number of other measures. 5.2.2 Increasing the amount and quality of language input As clearly stated above, one of the reasons that led to the students’ low competence of pronunciation was the fact that they had little chance to listen to authentic English, combined with the fact that the pronunciation of their Vietnamese teachers was not good enough. Therefore, at the university, every effort should be made to ensure the provision of high-quality language input. Teachers of English must be provided with more training on pronunciation so that they could really act as a model for the students to follow. As listening provides an ideal authentic resource for the practice of pronunciation, it will be ideal if teachers can combine these two aspects of English for the sake of the students’ mastery of pronunciation. A useful activity can be dictation, when students are asked to transcript an authentic piece of English speech. In this way, the students will be more familiar with the English sounds, and hopefully they can have better pronunciation. 5.2.3 Focusing more on students’ self study following the credit-based approach Evidently, students have better pronunciation when they have more awareness about maintaining accuracy when they speak. This explains why students tend to make fewer mistakes when they read aloud a passage than when they speak freely. The problem here lies in the fact that the students do not have enough practice. In addition, such an action research consumes much time, which may prevent many teachers from wanting to apply it. Therefore, what must be done is to increase the amount of students’ self-study. Ideally, this can be combined with the present credit-based approach that is applied at Hanoi National University. According to this approach, students would have to spend from one third to two thirds of their studying time at home. Teachers can help students achieve better pronunciation by making them spend more time at home practise English sounds in particular and English pronunciation in general. Each week, all students in the class will be given a wordlist, or a passage to read at home (a passage may be better because it is “more real to life” than wordlists), which focuses on a certain aspect of English pronunciation such as vowel sounds, consonant sounds, or intonation. The students are to record it and bring to the class the next week. The teacher will pick up students at random and let the whole class justify how well those students had done it, and how to improve the reading. This is actually the same as the pronunciation assignments that first year students have to make at the end of the first semester. However, this should be done right from the beginning of the school year, and every student must do it. 5.2.4 Organizing mock speaking test to find out the students’ pronunciation problems right at the beginning of the first year at university The mock speaking test used in the research showed that whereas some students share the same pronunciation problems, others have the problems of their own. It will not be student-centred (which is the focus of the present language teaching approach) if no attention is paid to the mistakes that the minority of the students make. Therefore, it is advisable that at the very first week of the first year, a mock speaking test is delivered to every student. They can do this in pairs or individually. This helps to find out the most common pronunciation mistakes from the students. Then, students can be classified into different groups who share the same problems rather than being taught in the same class with those who do not encounter the same pronunciation problems. An intensive program (which may ideally last for 5 weeks) should be provided to the students in their “special class”, which the focus on the particular sounds that the class members all have. There should be about five classes per week with different focuses (long vowel sounds, double vowel sounds, ending sounds, etc.). For students who have only one or two criteria, they only have to attend one or two classes. However, for those who have a lot of problems, they have to attend all of the classes. This may sound impossible due to the great requirement of teaching staff to do this. However, compared to the benefits it brings along, this can be treated as a good suggestion. Furthermore, it is stated clearly in the credit-based approach that teacher must find ways to check whether the students have done their homework. Therefore, teachers could replace the time they have to work at home by going to university and providing feedback to students directly. 5.3 Limitations of the study In spite of the effectiveness of the use of continuous feedback justified by the improvement of the students, it should be admitted that a thorough understanding of it has not been achieved due to a number of reasons. Firstly, the size of the study is rather small, consisting only 20 participants. This somehow acts as an obstacle to have a full understanding of the pronunciation problems that first year students have. For example, there may be other sounds that are also commonly mispronounced by the first year students, but was not visible in the experimental group. Therefore, to some extend, this limit the generalization of the research under different conditions. However, as this is an action research, such a limitation is unavoidable. The second limitation lies in the length of the research. It seems that a fifteen-week pronunciation program is not long enough for students to make significant progress. This explains for the fact that most students only make progress over some consonant sounds. If the research lasts longer, within a year, for example, the result is expected to be much better. As a matter of fact, the number of students who make progress regarding different sounds is not the same. For example, the sound /∫/ was the one that most students could pronounce well after the research. However, not many students could correct the sounds /p/, /t/, /k/. This may come from the effect of other factors, which the researcher could only have limited justification. Another problem is that the participants of the research were all female. There was one male student in the sample group, but his contribution to the research was excluded due to his fail to attend the research in its initial steps. Therefore, the data collected is largely gender-based, which may be troublesome when coming up with the questions: whether male students have the same pronunciation problems as female ones. Moreover, in order to collect real-life samples, the researcher asked the students to join a discussion with their partners. This may be more effective if the focus of the research program was connected speech rather than individual English sounds. It is because students’ interaction would be shown clearly, whereas the output of pronunciation of certain English sounds may be limited due to the students’ range of vocabulary. For example, students may do not use many words with the sound /∫/, so it is more difficult for the teacher to justify whether their pronunciation is correct or not. In addition, it is shown that some students make more progress than others during the research. This may come from other factors, which is their interest, the amount of time they practise pronunciation, their attention directed to pronunciation in other English classes, not only in pronunciation or speaking lesson. The researcher could not control those factors. Thus, whether continuous feedback alone can have a significant effect on the students’ performance is still questionable. Last but not least, this action research is an incomplete one due to the fact that the researcher has not published a paper on it, or carried out a seminar on the same problem. If she had been able to do so, she would have found alternative ways to improve the students’ pronunciation thanks to the experience from other colleagues. 5.4. Suggestions for further study Given the limitation of the study, it is highly recommended that further study should be conducted to gain a better understanding of how effective continuous feedback is on Vietnamese students’ pronunciation in general and English consonant sounds in particular. As for the first year students, in their very first semester, they are only required to have relatively correct pronunciation of English sounds. However, in their upcoming years, the requirements are much higher. This study only focuses on English consonant sounds, whereas English pronunciation covers a much wider range of aspects. Therefore, more research should be done in order to justify the effect of feedback on other aspects of pronunciation. The small size of the study is a big limitation. Therefore, it is almost impossible to generalize the effect of continuous feedback over a wider range of subjects. Thus, it is highly recommended that the research be applied to a larger number of students so as to gain better input for the research. As the gender factor is largely ignored in the research (no male student took part in it), it is questioned whether the research can be effective for male students. In addition, other factors like the students’ self study time, how much they pay attention to the pronunciation of the consonant sounds in other classes of English were not taken into consideration to yield the result of the research. These left factors should be exploited in further study. Last but not least, as pronunciation is a vital part of any English lesson, it can be combined with the teaching of language skills such as writing or reading. More research should be carried in this field so as to benefit the students to the most. 5.5 Conclusion The study provided an insight into the most common pronunciation problems regarding English consonant sounds of the first year students at the English Department, College of Foreign Languages, Vietnam National University, Hanoi. It also justified the effectiveness of continuous feedback on the students’ pronunciation. The research was conducted on a group of 20 first year students and lasted for 15 weeks. Overall, the results showed that there was a significant improvement regarding the pronunciation of the participants. The results of the study served as a basic ground for some pedagogical implications, which required more effort from the teachers in their teaching process. It was also clear that if combined with the present trend of applying credit-based approach, teachers would be more willing to involve in such a research program. It is much hoped that the study would be much beneficial to teachers of English regarding the aspects of English pronunciation they should focus on when teaching Vietnamese students. Given the time constraint, the scope and the nature of the study, it was not free from limitations like any educational study of the type. Therefore, suggestions for further studies were made with the hope that a better understanding of using continuous feedback to improve students’ pronunciation would be finally gained. Also, constructive comments from those who are concerned, especially the teachers at CFL (VNU), would be highly appreciated. REFERENCES Anh, T., et al. (2006) Practise Your Pronunciation and Speaking Skills. Nhà xuất bản Đại học quốc gia Hà Nội Baker, A. (1992). Ship or Sheep. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Black, M. and Sharp, W. (2006). Objective IELTS. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Black, P., William, D. (1998). 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