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

d it really difficult to achieve native-like pronunciation. From some expressions cited above, we can conclude that they all have difficulties in learning English pronunciation. The result shows that learning English pronunciation is really a problem at this school. So an investigation into Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School students’ difficulties in learning English should be done. 4.1.1.5. Students’ difficulties with English vowels. Question 5 was given to the students to address their difficulties with English vowels. Although 100% students agreed that they found English pronunciation difficult, it was shown in the result of this question that they had little trouble with English vowels. 39 respondents said that they had no difficulty with English vowels, 19 % expressed that they had some problems with short and long vowel couples such as / ɒ/ vs. /ɔ:/, /ɪ/ vs. /i:/, and many of them found difficult to distinguish the two vowels /æ/ and /e/(67%). Despite the result, we should consider whether these respondents could realize their problems and express them or not. This will be complemented by other instruments: classroom observation and interview. In short, question 5 investigated students’ problems with English vowels. The result shows they had some problems with short and long vowel couples and the two vowels /æ/ and /e/. 4.1.1.6. Students’ difficulties in acquiring English consonants. With the aim at investigating the problems that students may get when they acquiring English consonants, I designed question 6 as following: - Among English consonants, which ones do you find hard to learn? And it can be clearly seen from the result that they had more problems with English consonants than vowels. The most common problems with English consonants were three word- final fortis stops consonants /p/ (81 respondents), /t/ (35 respondents), /k/ 25 %), and three dental consonant stops /f/ (34%), /v/ (34%), /ð/ (53%). They also expressed that they had difficulties with some similar pairs such as / θ/ in English vs. /t/ in Vietnamese and /ð/in English vs. /d/ in Vietnamese. More interestingly, from questions 5 and 6, two respondents answered that they do not know what English vowels are and what consonants are. This is a very considerable point for the teachers and students to think about. 4.1.1.7. Students’ awareness of the concepts of stress, intonation and rhythm. Regarded to students’ awareness of the concepts of stress, intonation and rhythm, I gave them question 7 asking the respondents whether they understood the concepts with 3 possible answers for them to choose. -yes, understand very well - yes, but vaguely -not at all With the first concept, stress, most of the students seemed to understand the concept. There were 82 students who chose the first choice “yes, very well”, and 15 ones chose the second choice “yes, but vaguely” meanwhile only 3 respondents said that they understood nothing about stress. The second category asked students whether they understood intonation concept when they learn English or not. A small number (11%) chose the first choice “yes, very well”, meanwhile a considerable number of students (55%) said that they understood the concept but vaguely and 44% chose the last choice which means that they understood nothing about intonation. More seriously, the concept “rhythm” seemed to be least perceived by the students here. Among 100 respondents, only 8 respondents answered that they understood rhythm well meanwhile 39 ones chose the second answer and the left (53 respondents) answered that they did not understand the concept at all. In short, these three concepts, stress, intonation and rhythm are not understood well by the students here. This is a serious matter because even they do not understand the concepts, how could they avoid the problems caused by these matters? This is shown clearly in the result of three next question, question 8, 9, and 10 which aimed at exploring the difficulties when acquiring English stress, rhythm and intonation. 4.1.1.8. Students’ difficulties in learning English stress Question 8 investigated whether students had difficulties with English stress or not. There were three possible answers for them to choose as following to choose: Yes, very difficult. Yes, but not very difficult. Not difficult at all. As I mentioned in 4.1.1.7, the result showed that this is a serious problem for the students here. Among 100 respondents, there were 67 students who chose the first answer which means that English stress is very difficult for them, 26 ones chose the second choice “Yes, but not very difficult” and the left, 7 students answered that English stress is not difficult at all. In fact, that why English stress is problematic for Vietnamese is very easy to understand when we make a contrast analysis between the two language sound systems as in the literature review. So the above result is understandable although in question 7, there were 82 students answered that they understood the concept “stress” very well, 15 ones chose the second choice “yes, but vaguely” and only 3 respondents answered that they understood nothing about stress. In short, from questions 7 and 8, we can conclude that although students at this school understand the concept “stress”, they almost have difficulties with English stress. 4.1.1.9. Students’ difficulties in learning English rhythm With the regard to students’ difficulties in learning English rhythm, question 9 was designed to check whether the students at this school had problems with it or not. The result shows that English rhythm is really problematic here because 91% said that English rhythm was very difficult for them, 6% said that it was not very difficult, only 3 respondents, all were female, expressed that English rhythm was not difficult for them at all. From the above figures, we can conclude that English rhythm is a serious problem for students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School. Further more, we should also notice that among 3 students who said that it was not difficult at all, they all were female. 4.1.1.10.Students’ difficulties in learning English intonation. With the question “ Do you have difficulties when using intonation to express different meanings of sentences?”, I also gave the respondents three possible answers: Yes, very difficult. Yes, but not very difficult. Not difficult at all. And the following are the result: Number of respondents Yes, very difficult (%) Yes, but not very difficult (%) Not difficult at all (%) 100 82 13 5 Table 3. Students evaluation on difficulties in learning English intonation. Table 3 shows that students here do get difficulties in learning English intonation. 82 respondents (82%) confessed that learning English intonation was of great for them. 13% also found English intonation difficult but not very much, and only 5 % answered that they found it not difficult at all. Question 8, 9 and 10, in short, investigated whether students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School had problems when they acquired English stress, rhythm and intonation. The findings show that these issues are very problematic for them. The majority of these students answered that they had problems with English stress, rhythm and intonation. Only a very small number of these students answered that they found them easy to learn. 4.1.2. Interview: Students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation as experienced by teachers at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School. With ten questions in the questionnaires, I investigated students’ attitude towards learning English and English pronunciation. The instrument also helped me to confirm that students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation do exist. However, with the students' level, it is very difficult for them to express their problems. That is why I employed the second instrument, the interview, to the teachers, to get more data about problems that students here often meet when learning English pronunciation with my belief that the teachers are better at grouping and expressing the pronunciation problems . In order to obtain more in-depth data, ten teachers of English teaching at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School were selected for a structured interview. In fact, at this school, there were only ten teachers of English, and they all were very young, the most experienced was 6 years of teaching and the youngest one was one year of teaching experience. The questions of the interview were made in Vietnamese so that the teachers had no difficulties in expressing their ideas. Moreover, giving them interviews in Vietnamese made them more confident and natural to answer the questions in order to guarantee the truthfulness of the information for data analysis. All the interviews were audio-taped and transcribed for translation. The full transcript of the interview is given in the Appendix. All the interviewees were asked nine same questions in the structured interview: Do you find that your students have difficulties in learning English pronunciation? In your opinion, what are the main problems that students often meet when they learn English pronunciation? Do your students have difficulties when they learn English vowels? What are they? Do your students have difficulties when they learn English consonants? What are they ? Do your students have problems with English consonant clusters? How do they often make mistakes? Do your students often make stress mistakes? If yes, how? Do your students often make rhythm and intonation mistakes? If yes, how? 8. Can you think of the possible reasons for these difficulties? 9. What can you do in your lessons to help your students overcome these difficulties? Do you think that your methods are effective? For question 1, all of ten respondents agreed that their students do have difficulties in learning English pronunciation. According to these teachers, their learners make a lot of mistakes when producing any English , from single words to complex utterances. These teachers also added that their students made so many mistakes in pronunciation when they spoke English that they daren’t speak English in the class. With question 2 which investigated students main difficulties in learning English pronunciation as experienced by the teachers, the respondents gave a lot of problems that their students often meet. However, the following are some main ones: • Teacher 1: My students get many problems in pronunciation when they speak English. The most common ones are word-ending sounds and stress. • Teacher 4: It is very difficult to talk about all the problems that my students have in English pronunciation. I am just able to give out some main ones such as ending word sounds, stress and intonation. That’s the main ones, there are a lot to talk about. For example, they also get difficulty in distinguish the two pairs /æ/ and /e/ or between /ð/ and /dʒ/ . • Teacher 6: I do not know what to talk about this because there are so many mistakes that students often make in my English lessons. The main ones may be the mistakes in producing ending word sounds, stress, and intonation. Question 3 concerns vowel problems that students here often meet. According to these ten teachers, the main vowels that were problematic for their students were the vowel pair /æ/ and /e/. They also expressed that the students here often made mistakes between the pairs /ɒ/ and /ɔ:/, /ɪ/ and /i:/, /ǝ/ and/ɜ:/, /ʊ/ and /u:/. They complained that their students often substitute the long vowels by the short ones, except the last pair, the /ʊ/ and /u:/, the students there often have a long /u:/ substitute for the short /ʊ/. Teacher 6 also added more examples as below: -“good” is pronounced /gu:d/ -“see” is pronounced /sɪ/ -“read” is pronounced /rɪd/. Question number 4 of the interview regards to the problems students at that school often meet with English consonants. With the question “Do your students have difficulties when they learn English consonants?”, all the ten answers were “yes”. The teachers gave many mistakes that students often made with English consonants. After doing analysis from the record, I had some main conclusions as followings: The most serious problems with English consonants for the students there, according to ten interviewed teachers, are final position consonants. The students often ignored the last consonants, especially the six consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, /v/, /ð/. Many students also substitute Vietnamese consonants for some English ones such as /t/ for /θ/, /d/ for /ð/, /z/ for / dʒ/, /ʃ/ for /s/ and /f/ for /p/. Question 5 touches with students’ problems with English consonant clusters. All of the respondents agreed that their students had problems with English consonant clusters. According to these interviewees, most of the students often omit one or more consonants in a consonant cluster. The followings are some complaints about this: • Teacher 3: Oh, yes. Maybe because in our Vietnamese language does not have consonant clusters, our students often have a lot of difficulties with English consonant clusters. They often produce the pronunciation with the absence of one or even more than one consonant in a cluster. • Teacher 9: Yes, they do. I think English consonant clusters are very difficult for students because even my students can not pronounce correctly one single consonant. My students almost ignore one or two consonants in a cluster, for example, the word “ last” could be pronounced “lat”, the word “once” could be pronounced “one”. Question 6 concerns stress problems. All of the ten respondents agreed that their students often have stress problems. According to these interviewees, their students make stress mistakes very often, the followings are very nice answers: • Teacher 2: Yes, of course, most of the time. My students often give no stress to more than one syllable words, or if they do, they put the stress in an incorrect position. • Teacher 8 : Oh, yes, stress is a very serious problem in teaching English pronunciation. My students often ask me how to know where to put the stress, and you know, we have no answer, just some rules. Even some of my students do not know the concept “stress”. • Teacher 10: Yes, they do have difficulties in learning English stress. My students often give no stress to more than one syllable words. Some better ones give stress, but incorrect position. With the regards to English rhythm and intonation mistakes, question 7 was made to the respondents. The question investigated whether the students at that school had problems with English rhythm and intonation or not. Ten teachers responded that their students all had problems with English rhythm and intonation. Some of them complained that the students there did not know the importance of rhythm and intonation in expressing meanings although the teacher corrected them many times, so they often gave no rhythm and intonation. And some better students gave some rhythm and intonation, but often the falling tone whenever they spoke English. Teacher 2 and teacher 7 expressed the same opinion that because their students were so bad at English, so they often ignored correcting rhythm and intonation mistakes. Teacher 3 and teacher 9 complained that even in English textbook, there were no focus on teaching rhythm and intonation. Question 8 concerns the main reasons for these above difficulties. With this question, the respondents seem to get difficult to express their ideas although the question were given in Vietnamese. I audio taped and then found their main thoughts as followings: Most teachers thought that the main reason for this was lack of opportunity for students to practise English. They all shared a common thought that their students did not have much time to practise English. The second main reason, according to these teachers, is the influence of the mother tongue, especially the Ha Tinh accent. The students were so affected that they produced the English utterances sound like Hatinh tone. Further more, some respondents here also added that the students were very lazy in speaking English. They just studied for exams which focused much on grammar. The objectives of the exams also made them lazy in learning English pronunciation. Another negative reason that the respondents gave for students’ bad pronunciation is that teachers’ pronunciation seemed to be not good enough for them to listen. They also complained that some teachers did not pay much attention to teaching pronunciation. The teachers gave some reasons that sound reasonable. To have some recommendations for a better English pronunciation teaching, I made the ninth question to the interviewees. The question asked the interviewees what they should do to improve the situation. The following are some nice ones: • Teacher 1: I think there are many techniques to improve learners’ pronunciation such as information gap activities, matching exercises, chain stories. If we employ these techniques well, our students’ pronunciation must be improved. • Teacher 6: There are many ways to improve our students’ pronunciation. The most important one is our manner of teaching. We should encourage our students to speak English. Many of them are afraid of making mistakes when they speak English. If we can create a good atmosphere for them to speak, their language will be improved. I also think that we should employ different techniques in the lessons so that the lesson are easy to understand and interesting. • Teacher 7: The most common techniques I often use to teach individual sounds are minimal pairs, visual aids, and when I teach stress, rhythm and intonation, I use some techniques such as conducting, tapping or exaggeration. In short, from the interview, we can get some brief conclusions as followings: According to these teachers, students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School have difficulties in learning English pronunciation. The main problems, as experienced by these teachers, are word- ending sounds, stress, rhythm and intonation. The main reasons for pronunciation problems, in the teachers’ opinions, are the influence of the mother tongue, especially of the Ha Tinh accent, and the lack of opportunity to practise speaking English. The teacher here realized the problems and made some try to help their students overcome the problems when applying some techniques in pronunciation lessons. 4.1.3.Classroom observation: To support the two first instruments, the questionnaires and the interview, I also employed classroom observation to find out students’ general attitude toward learning English pronunciation and their main difficulties in learning it . During three weeks I attended five lessons including different lessons: 3 speaking lessons, two grammar ones which were randomly chosen at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School given by five different teachers. I chose not only speaking lessons but also grammar lessons to attend because not only in speaking lessons are the pronunciation problems revealed but also in grammar ones are they revealed, especially in Language Focus, there are lessons for pronunciation. However, because of technical limitation, I did not video- taped or audio- taped the lessons I attended. Further more, these instruments might cause unnatural atmosphere in the class which could also give unreliable data from my observation. That is why I decided to take notes of classroom techniques as well as pronunciation problems that the students often met as much as possible. These note-takings may not involve all the problems that supplement those which I had got from the questionnaires and interview. Among five lessons I observed, I chose two lessons to describe: Lesson Language Focus – Unit 14 and lesson Speaking – Unit 14. In Excerpt 1 (Lesson Language Focus – Unit 14), the teacher started with warm-up by asking the students to report a football match. After that, she had some volunteers to present and asked the students to vote for the best reporter. With the first part, the pronunciation part, the teacher guided her students to continue the lesson by asking the students to repeat some words that are related to the topic “football” and at the same time wrote down the words consisting the two consonants “g” and “k”. After that she read the words as a model, then she asked her students to repeat the words in chorus and individually. To move on to the second part, grammar exercises which focused on the two structures “Be going to + V” and “ Will +V”, the teacher hanged a big picture on the board and introduced the situation and a dialogue. Mary’ bicycle has a flat tyre. So she asks her father to repair it for her. Mary: Dad, my bicycle has a flat tyre. Dad: Really? Ok. I will repair it for you. Five minutes later, Mary’s mother goes out from the kitchen. Mother: Our daughter’s bicycle has a flat tyre. Dad: I have known. I am going to repair it for her. From the illustration, the teacher had the students explain the difference between the two structures “Be going to + V” and “ Will +V” and do the tasks. After that, she called some students to read out their answers to check. In Excerpt 2, (lesson Speaking – Unit 14), the teacher involved the students to the lesson by having them work in pairs talking about the football teams shown in the pictures of the 2006 World Cup with some guided questions. Task 2 was done in pairs again. During the time students did task 2, the teacher went round the class controlling and helped students to do the task, too. I also saw that sometimes she corrected students’ mistakes in pronunciation. From two Excerpts, I found out that students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School made a lot of pronunciation mistakes. The mistakes will be in more details in the following part. Further more, it was shown in the lesson that the students were not really willing to speak English, they just spoke when the teacher called them, not many students volunteered even in speaking lesson. 4.1.3.1. Student’ pronunciation problems observed: In the five lessons I observed, I did find many problems when students spoke English. The most common mistakes, the same as in the interview, was consonant endings. Most students here did not pronounce the consonants in the final positions, which can cause a lot of misunderstanding. They did a lot of word –ending omission. This is a serious problem. Most of the students here did not pronounce word-ending sounds, especially the three word- final fortis stops consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, and three dental consonant stops /f/, /v/, /ð/. I heard many students omit these ending sounds when they spoke English . With a sentence like : “I have to sleep in a tent, the weather might be bad”, the students could pronounce “ I ha to slee in a ten, the weather migh be ba”. Or a sentence like “ I have to hire a coach, which costs a lot of money” may be pronounced like “ I ha to hi a coat, which cost me a lot of money” ( Unit 14- speaking) Further more, students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School also made mistakes when they pronounce the two consonants /ð/ and / θ/. Most of the sound /θ/ is pronounced the same as a heavily aspirated stop /t/ in Vietnamese and they also substituted a /d/ for /ð/. Another problem that I found out when observing these lessons is that students also got difficulties in distinguishing the two vowels /e/ and / æ /. The sound / æ / was mostly pronounced like /e/. That is why students often have difficulties in distinguish between “bad” and “bed” or “men” and “man”. That is about vowel and consonant problems. With more in-depth observation, there were many other pronunciation problems such as consonant clusters. In English, we have to learn to produce a large variety of new syllable types that contain consonant clusters. But these students tend to delete one or more consonants from a difficult cluster. For example, the word “first” was pronounced “firt” without no “s” between “r” and “t”, or some might pronounce “firs” without no “t” at the end of the word. Even worse, many mistakes were made incredibly. When observing the lessons, I took a lot of notes of many other pronunciation problems that can not be categorized into any groups problems. The following are some nice examples: expertise : /ekspɜ:ti:z/ into /ekspɜ:taɪz/ will : /wɪl/ into /wɪn/ exercise : /eksəsaɪz/ into /ɪksəsaɪz/ experiment : /ɪksperɪmənt/ into /ɪkspɪərɪmənt/. cold : /k ǝʊld/ into /k u:d/ I also found out that –s and –ed endings are also a difficulty for these students. Most of the students pronounced the –ed ending into /id/ whenever it should have been /t/ or /d/. All the –ed was pronounced /id/ although I heard the teacher corrected several times in front of the whole class. From classroom observation, I also saw that learners here were not really willing to speak English in classroom. And the techniques that the teachers used to teach them were not really various and interesting. Further more, these teachers did not pay much attention to correct students’ error in pronunciation. 4.1.3.2. Stress, rhythm and intonation. Word stress is a problem for not only Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School but also for most Vietnamese students. As I stated in the literature review, Vietnamese language is a tone language and each word consist of one syllable, that is why Vietnamese learners of English are not familiar with stress. Bounded in the same situation, Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School students also had stress problems. Both in speaking and grammar lessons, most students did not give a stress when they spoke English. And if some did, they might give incorrect locations of the stresses. But the number of these students is very low. Most students did not give any stress when they pronounced English. As a result, they also failed to differentiate sufficiently between stressed and unstressed vowels, producing full vowels in unstressed syllables. So they may pronounce a word like “possibility” into / posɪbɪlɪtɪ/ or the word “economy” into /ɪkɒnɒmɪ/ As I stated in the literature review, Vietnamese may have difficulties with the characteristic intonation patterns of English because pitch functions differently in Vietnamese. When observing the lessons, I did realize that this was a serious problem. Further more, because of the accents in this area, students here are seriously affected by the pitch level. Many of them did not give an enough fall or rise pitch that could cause misinterpreting of the speaker’s utterances. I observed that students here did not give a final rising in yes-no questions, or a final rising-falling in statements, command and wh- questions. However, with an elementary level, this problem is not really a serious problem although their pronunciation does not does not seem to be any native-like English at all. With the interview instrument, I found out some main pronunciation problems when students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School spoke English. However, this would not have been sufficient if I had not employed classroom observation. This method supplemented the first instrument. It gave me more data for analysis. From my own observation, I found out that students here had the main problems as investigated from the interview such as word- ending sounds, stress, intonation and rhythm. However, with my English level, I could see the problems more clearly from classroom observation than from the interview. 4.2.Conclusion: This chapter, chapter IV, presents the findings of the study to answer the two questions proposed in 1.3. First of all, the analysis of the data shows that Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School students had positive attitude towards learning English and they were aware of the importance of learning English for their future as well as for their exams. They were also aware of the importance of learning English pronunciation. Most of them stated that English pronunciation can help them achieve the right target in learning English, that is to communicate well with the others. However, the students here had a lot of difficulties in learning English pronunciation . Data analysis from interview and classroom observation shows that Vietnamese students have problems with some English vowels such as /e/ vs. /æ/, some consonants such as /p/, /t/,/k/, etc. , word endings, stress, rhythm and intonation. Chapter V: Recommendations and conclusions. In this last chapter, the findings of the study will be summarized first, then some suggestions for teaching English pronunciation will be followed. This chapter also discusses the limitations if the study as well as some recommendations for further research. 5.1. Summary of the findings With the aims stated in the first Introduction part, I did my research with some issues concerning English pronunciation learning. These issues include students’ general attitude towards learning English and English pronunciation, students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation. Firstly, the findings show that most of the students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School students have positive attitude toward learning English. They are aware of the importance of learning English for their exams and their future jobs. Most of them also see the importance of English pronunciation. They stated that without good English pronunciation, they would fail to communicate with the foreigners. However, a quite large number of these respondents did not realize the role of English pronunciation. For these ones, traditional English tests and teaching have not focused much on pronunciation, so they are not familiar with learning it. Further more, English pronunciation is so difficult, that is why they want to ignore it. The second findings to the question proposed is that students do have difficulties in learning English pronunciation. From the questionnaires, interview and classroom observation, I found out that the main problems, firstly to say, are word- ending sounds. The main word ending sounds that students often have problems with are the ending consonant stops /s/, /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, /v/, /ð/, /θ/. The problem is that they often omit these word ending sounds. Further more, they also have problems with –ed and –s endings. Most of the students often pronounce all the –ed endings into /id/ and all the –s endings into /s/. They also make mistakes with some English couples such as /e/ vs / æ /, /z/ vs. /ð/, /t/ and / θ/. The second serious problem that students often make is stress. Students pronounce most of the words that consist of two or more than two syllables with no stress. And if they give any stress, they rarely give the correct place of the stress. As a certain, students here have problems with rhythm and intonation. Especially, students here are strongly affected by Ha Tinh accent. The last issue that was investigated from the study was about teaching English pronunciation methods. From my observation and interview, I found out that although the teachers at that school did some attempts to help their students overcome pronunciation problems, they did not employ enough various techniques to make the lessons more interesting and easier to understand. The lessons seemed to be rather boring, and even I heard some teachers make serious pronunciation mistakes. So the problems here may be not only for the students but also for the teachers of English to think. Teachers should try to improve their pronunciation and their teaching methods to help their students overcome the problems. In short, the study mainly focused on the difficulties that students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School often met when they learned English pronunciation. The main problems, as stated in the Findings, were word-ending sounds, stress and intonation. 5.2. Suggestions for pronunciation teaching in upper secondary schools In accordance with the above findings, the followings will be some suggestions for English pronunciation teaching for upper secondary school teachers of English. First of all, as I mentioned in the first part, the teachers’ methods of pronunciation teaching plays a very important role in motivating and improving students’ English in general and students’ pronunciation in particular. If the techniques employed in the lessons are various and suitable, they will make the lesson easier to understand and more interesting to follow. As a result, the students will be motivated to study. With the fact that most classes in Vietnamese upper secondary schools are large and heterogeneous, it is very difficult for teachers to individualize their teaching. So, teachers should be aware of this difficulty and vary their techniques and activities so that they can involve more students in the lessons. By doing so, they can also reduce the boredom of the lesson at the same time. There is a saying that “no method is best”. There are many different techniques for teachers to choose. What teachers have to do with these various techniques is to choose suitable ones to the students’ level, teaching conditions and learners’ motivation. We can apply different techniques for different purposes of teaching pronunciation. The followings are some suggestions for teachers to help students overcome problems in learning pronunciation. However, as I mentioned earlier, no method is best. The followings are just some suggested recommendations. 5.2.1. Teaching pronunciation on the level of accuracy: Teaching individual sounds. The first issue in teaching pronunciation on the level of accuracy is teaching individual sounds. There are many useful steps that we are suggested to follow. First of all, a brief sound articulation description should be given to the learners. Then we should provide our students with some exercises from easy and simple to more and more complicated and difficult ones. The techniques that we can employ to teach individual sounds are minimal pairs, information-gap activities, matching exercises, chain stories, fluency activities, dialogues, role plays and games. These various techniques can help students improve their learning pronunciation, and at the same time, they can motivate learning atmosphere. The followings are the detail description of some techniques: Bilingual minimal pairs: (T. Bowen, and J. Marks, (1992)). This activity is very suitable to monolingual classes. It can be used to make contrasts between English and students’ mother tongue. The procedure of this techniques is, first, to put up on the board a list of minimal pairs. The first column is Vietnamese sounds, the second one is English ones with similar pronunciations. The teacher will read out the list, but just choose only one word from one pair either in English or in Vietnamese, and ask students to identify which choice the teacher have made in each case by shouting out the language “Vietnamese” or “ English”. Missing words: (A. Doff, (1988)) Another very simple way to teach individual sounds is using missing words. Using this techniques, the teacher says some short and simple sentences in which there is one missing word, then the teacher can ask students to say a word to fill in each gap. For example, if we want to teach the sound “g”, we can have our students fill the gaps such as : A boy and a ….(girl) This is a …… of wine (glass) Making sentences (A. Doff, (1988)) With this technique, the teacher can help his students to practise either one sound or two similar sounds that the students may get confused. Firstly, the teacher provides them with two groups of words that consist the sounds need practising and gets the students to work in pairs. For example, if the sounds need practising are /ɜ:/ and /ǝ/, the teachers should present two lists of words of opposite sounds on the board like this: Group 1: Group 2: girl economy alternative possibility further sister nurse recorder surname preparation He can ask students to make three sentences with words of two groups. In order to make them know what to do, the teacher can make some examples first. Then the teacher can ask one student from a group to read out their sentences, the teacher may correct immediately if the student makes a serious mistake in pronouncing sounds, stress or intonation. Sounds bingo: (T. Bowen, and J. Marks, (1992)). This technique is suggested to help the beginner level students to recognize sounds with spelling. First of all, the teacher provides learners with a copy of Sounds Bingo worksheet and tells them that he is going to randomly pronounce sounds from the phonemic chart (e.g. number 1 /e/; number 2 /m/). If the students hear a sound which is on the card, they should write the corresponding number next to the sound. The winner is the first one to number correctly all the sounds in their card. Sounds discrimination exercise: (T. Bowen, and J. Marks, (1992)). This activity can help to sentitise learners to minimal differences between individual phonemes and enable them to recognize them in context. To do this, the teacher firstly gives each learner a copy of the worksheet and tells them that he is going to read contrasting sounds or words aloud to the class and that they must decide which sound is being uttered each time and indicate this by ticking the appropriate column next to the number. Information gap activities:(P. Avery and S. Erhlich (1992) ) One of the easiest techniques for practising consonants in a communicative way is to use information gap activities. For example, if the students are confused with two sounds /b/ and /v/, we can use the following activity to help them overcome this. Choose a topic such as food and have students brainstorm and think of as many related words as possible which contain the sound /b/ and /v/.It is best for students to work in groups so that they have more opportunity to generate these words in a communicative fashion, If students are beginners, it is good for teachers to provide them with pictures or clues. Students might come up with “berry”, “veal”, “liver”, “vegetables”, “vitamins”, etc. Teachers can also ask students to generate examples of names containing these two sounds. When enough words have been generated, the teacher can number the names and foods on slips of paper and hand out even- numbered foods and odd- numbered names to one group and odd- numbered foods and even- numbered names to another group. Teachers can also hand out blank grids and have students work in pairs or in groups questioning each other about “ who bought what at the store”. Once the grids are filled out, the result of the activities can be presented to the class. In so doing, the students gain further communicative practice with these sounds. Role play which incorporate some of the food words and names identified above can be used as a follow up to this activities. Variations on these activities can be carried out with many pronunciation contrast around a variety of themes. Matching exercises: :(P. Avery and S. Erhlich (1992) ) Another way in teaching English consonants is by giving students matching exercises. The teacher can divide the class into two groups, group A has a written description of several people, group B has a picture containing all of the people of which there are descriptions. The object of this activity is to match the written description with the appropriate people. For example, if we want our students to practise the two sounds /b/ and /p/, we have some pictures with suggested names: Becky and Peter. Students might describe the pictures as followings: Becky is carrying a big bag Becky’s shoes are black Peter is playing football Peter is playing near a park. In attempting to match the descriptor with the appropriate person, the students gain practice producing the relevant sounds. A variation on this activity has these descriptors generated by the students themselves. Creating such descriptors, especially in groups, provide additional communicative practice of the consonants. Chain stories:(P. Avery and S. Erhlich (1992) ) Each student receives a phrase containing the sound contrast being practised. The first student must embed that phrase in a short story of no longer than four sentences. The task of the other students is to guess the embeded phrase based on the correct pronunciation of the relevant sound or sound contrast. The next student continues the story using the phrase that he has received. Fluency-square activities: (P. Avery and S. Erhlich (1992) ) A less communicative technique, requiring less preparation for teachers is fluency- square. There are four illustrated squares used to contrast at least two sounds. A larger square is divided into four squares with each of the smaller squares depicting an activity differing from a contrasting square in terms of one variable. For example: Square 1: Cassie took a bus this morning. Square 2: Cassie took a bath this morning Square 3: Cathy took a bus this morning. Square 4: Cathy took a bath this morning. Squares 1 and 4 differ in the contrast between /s/ and / θ/ in “Cassie” and “Cathy”. Squares 1 and 2 and squares 3 and 4 differ in the contrast between /s/ and /θ/ in “ bath” and “bus”, etc. Students must describe the activities in each square so that another student is able to identify the correct square. For students to be able to gain the correct information about the activities, they have to be able to both hear and produce the differences between these consonant contrast. In short, there are many ways of teaching English consonants, the above are just some main ones. They are very useful in teaching consonants in a very communicative way. 5.2.2. Teaching pronunciation on the level of fluency With a higher level, level of fluency, we need to teach our students consonant clusters, stress, rhythm and intonation. The followings are some techniques to teach these matters. 5.2.2.1. Teaching consonant clusters. As I mentioned in chapter II that consonant clusters are troublesome for Vietnamese students because Vietnamese students are familiar with the model vowel-consonant-vowel. In English, consonant clusters have two positions, initial and final. Most of Vietnamese students often have more difficulties with the final consonant clusters than the initial ones. In this case, teachers of English should combine different techniques, using demonstration combined with association and explanation. The followings are some techniques from the easy type to more difficult and meaningful practice: Listen and repeat individual words containing consonant clusters. Listen and repeat the phrases containing consonant clusters. Listen and repeat conversation containing consonant clusters. 5.2.2.2. Stress, rhythm and intonation. There are several techniques that teachers can use to teach pronunciation of fluency level . They are conducting, tapping, nonsense syllables, slow speech, backward buildup, etc. However, because this is just a suggested recommendation for teaching pronunciation, I will just go deeper into more details with some techniques. Dialogues, role plays and games: :(P. Avery and S. Erhlich (1992) ) Other ways to teach contractions, linking and common reduced expressions are using dialogues, role plays or games. These activities not only provide students opportunity to practise but also create an interesting atmosphere to learn. We can give students an original dialogue and then create role plays of the same situation without using the original dialogue. When students do role plays, many high lighted words will be generated. We can also use games to teach student consonants such as Bingo game or Tic-Tac-Toe. These games can be used to help learners practise consonant contrasts. Conducting: :(P. Avery and S. Erhlich (1992) ) The most widely used techniques to teach stress, rhythm and intonation is by conducting. Teachers of English can use hands and harms to show the stress, rhythm and intonation of a word, a phrase or a sentence. For example, teachers can use a rapid downward motion of the arm to indicate which syllable receive the major stress in a word. Or when teachers want to illustrate intonation patterns, they can raise or lower their arms when they speak the sentence to demonstrate the rising or falling contours. After showing the models, teachers can ask students to do the conduct again. Tapping:(Peter Avery and Susan Erhlich (1992) ) This is a good way to encourage our students to produce English with correct stress and rhythm. The teachers can tap on a desk or a table with their tips, fingers or even a pencil to demonstrate the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables of words, phrases or sentences. The teachers can tap only on the stressed syllables or on both the stressed and unstressed syllables. Backward buildup: :(P. Avery and S. Erhlich (1992) ) or Back-chaining (D. Adrian (1988) With over longer utterances, we can develop our students’ fluency and improve linking and intonation by backward buildup. The technique involves starting with the final word of a sentence and adding to it the preceding words, one at a time. For example: I can’t understand anything you are saying. Will be built up from the back-word: Saying Are saying You are saying Anything you are saying Understand anything you are saying Can’t understand anything you are saying I can’t understand anything you are saying. Penny Ur (1991) has also suggested some following techniques that may help to improve students’ English pronunciation: Imitation of teacher or recorded model of sounds, words and sentences. recording of learner’s speech, contrasted with native model. systematic explanation and instruction ( including details of the structure and movement of parts of the mouth) imitation drills: repetition of sounds, words and sentences. Choral repetition of drills. varied repetition of drills.( varied speed, volume and mood). learning by heart of sentences, rhymes and jingles. jazz-chants. tongue twisters. self-correction through listening to recording of own speech. In short, with the techniques described above, we should choose ones in accordance with our students’ learning style and strategies. There are many other techniques but because of limited time and space, I just give some effective and suitable ones for you to reference. 5.3. Limitations of the study. Although I have tried much to have some useful findings, the study, like many other studies, has some limitations. Firstly, there are some limitations in terms of research methodology. Although I employ different techniques to complement one another, they may not sufficient to get the most reliable data. The respondents might not have given their full thought when answering the questionnaires. Further more, in the interview, there were only ten teachers participated, so there might have been more problems that I did not investigate. In addition, when observing these English classes, I did not record, I just took notes as much as possible. This could be a limitation because during the time of observing, I could not record all the pronunciation mistakes that the students made. In brief, all the above are the main and important limitations I had during my research. There must be other limitations but the above are some main and important ones that I want to mention here. 5.4. Recommendations for further study. In this study, because of limited time and space, there are some issues that have not been studied. Basing on the findings and the limitations of the study, I would like to give some recommendations for further studies as followings: First of all, because of the limited time, I did not study to find which techniques of teaching pronunciation would be appropriate for the students at that school. So, an investigation into suitable techniques to apply to teaching students at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School English pronunciation should be conducted. Secondly, as I stated in the first part that Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School is located in a mountainous area in Ha Tinh where there are many particular characteristics, it can not be generalized into all other schools in our country although pronunciation is a generally serious problem in teaching and learning English in our country. Therefore, further study on this issue in many other schools located in different areas should also be conducted. 5.5.Conclusion. In conclusion, the study was carried out to investigate the pronunciation problems at Phuc Trach Upper Secondary School. It helped me to find out not only the problems but also some main causes of these problems so that we could find out the ways to help the students overcome these problems. The study were expected to be a very useful indication for the teachers here to think about the methodology they are applying to teaching English pronunciation. The findings of the study shows that most of the students here had difficulties acquiring some final consonant stops which do not exist in the Vietnamese language, some similar pairs such as /æ/ vs. /e/, /ɔ:/ vs. /ɒ/, /ð/ vs. /z/, etc., especially they had a big problem with stress, rhythm and intonation. The findings also gave us some main reasons for these difficulties such which were the influence of the mother tongue, the poor learning condition and the lack of opportunities to practise English pronunciation. Based on the results of the findings, the study also provided with some recommendations for teaching English pronunciation which were expected to help them overcome all the problems. If the teachers understand the problems throughly and apply the recommended techniques to teaching pronunciation suitably, the matter will certainly be improved.