CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
1.1 Rationale
The trend of globalization in every field all over the world has given foreign languages in
general and English in particular a greater role than ever before. As English is largely
used in international settings, the ability to communicate in real-life situations is very
important. Therefore, speaking plays an essential role because without it, communication
cannot take place directly between people.
Dealing with how to improve speaking skills, learners face the problem of pronunciation.
A consideration number of learners’ pronunciation errors and how they inhibit successful
communication is a good reason for the justification of why it is important to teach
pronunciation to learners.
There is a great number of books relating to the teaching of English pronunciation, most
of which refer to specific exercises to help students achieve better pronunciation.
However, in my experience as a teacher of English for three years, I have witnessed many
cases in which students are able to do pronunciation exercises, but fail to have proper
pronunciation in their real-life speaking. Thus, a good mark in doing pronunciation
exercises in written form does not accompany good pronunciation.
In my opinion, the problem lies in the fact that students do not receive adequate feedback
from the teacher on their pronunciation performance. Some students even do not know
how to form certain sounds in English. Therefore, it is impossible for them to have
genuine production of sounds and sentences. Despite this, little can be done about this due
to a vast number of factors, the most serious of which is the high student-teacher ratio in
Vietnamese universities, which is about 25 to one (at universities in which English is a
major). The teachers hardly have enough time to pay attention and give correction to
every student’ speaking performance in general and pronunciation in particular. As a
result, students are unable to identify their weak aspects.
All of these motivated me to conduct an action research on the use of continuous
feedback with the aim at improving the first year students’ English pronunciation.
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1.2 Statement of the problem
As a teacher at the English Department, College of Foreign Languages, Hanoi National

Those are the main reasons why I would like to propose An Action Research on the Use
of Continuous Feedback to Improve the First Year Students’ English Pronunciation at the
English Department, College of Foreign Languages, Vietnam National University, Hanoi
to be the topic of my thesis.
1.3 Purposes of the study
This research was designed to improve the students’ pronunciation performance by using
continuous feedback. Generally, it has three purposes:
- To find possible explanations for the weak pronunciation competence of the students
- To investigate pronunciation problems among first year students of English at the
English Department, College of Foreign Languages, Vietnam National University,
Hanoi . However, due to the limitation of time, the researcher only focused on English
consonant sounds.
- To justify the effect of continuous feedback on students’ pronunciation.
1.4 Research questions
With the above purposes, the research questions are:
1. What are the possible reasons that lead to students’ weak pronunciation of English?
2. What are the students’ most common problems regarding English consonant sounds?
3. Can continuous feedback improve students’ English pronunciation? If yes, to what
extend?
1.5 Scope of the study
The research was conducted on the first year students at the English Department of CFL,
VNU. Regarding its scope, the research was only aimed at justifying the effect of
continuous feedback on the students’ pronunciation of English consonant sounds. Other
aspects of English pronunciation would not be investigated. Even though the researcher
made use of speaking tests as an important instrument for the research, only issues
concerning the students’ pronunciation of consonant sounds were taken into
consideration.
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1.6 Research method
The method employed in this study is an action research, with the use of a number of

because it justifies the effectiveness of the research.
Chapter five discusses the findings of the study, provides pedagogical implications, as
well as presents limitations of the research. It also makes recommendations for further
research in the same field.
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CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Pronunciation teaching and learning
2.1.1 The importance of teaching and learning pronunciation
According to Kelly (2000: 11), it is vital for a language learner to have good
pronunciation of that language. However, pronunciation competence does not go with the
mastery of grammar rules or a good lexis command. Some learners may have already
acquired a considerable amount of grammar and vocabulary, but still fail to communicate
effectively due to their weak pronunciation. A learner who mispronounces a variety of
words would cause great difficulties for a speaker of that language to understand, which is
a frustrating experience. Therefore, it can be concluded that pronunciation plays a vital
role in learner’s speaking ability. Only when a learner is competent in pronunciation can
his speaking skills are acclaimed.
In addition to that, bad pronunciation inevitably has negative effect on the learner’s
listening ability. When a learner has already been accustomed to the wrong way of
pronouncing particular language sounds and utterances, it is unlikely that s/he will be able
to recognize the authentic pronunciation by native speakers. There are many cases in
which learners are asked to listen to a familiar expression by native speakers with the use
of mainly common words. However, they fail to interpret it because they find its
pronunciation totally different from the way they are used to speaking or listening in their
daily communication. As a result, they cannot understand what the speakers mean.
Moreover, it is obvious that good pronunciation serves as a strong motivation for
language learners. Most language learners show considerable enthusiasm for
pronunciation as they consider it a good way to show that they are competent of the
language. Once they have obtained adequate pronunciation competence, they gradually
build up strong confidence for themselves and are ready to learn new things without

However, most methods give a genuine concern for the teaching of pronunciation. The
appearance of a method often brings about new approaches towards the teaching of
particular issues, most of which are affected by the time they come into being.
In Direct Method, which first became popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the
teacher provides learners with a model for native-like speech. This can either be the
teacher himself or a recording. By listening and then imitating the model excessively,
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learners gradually develop their pronunciation. Some successors to this method are called
naturalistic methods, which mean methods that devote a period of learning solely to
listening before speaking is allowed. Linguists following this method believe that when
learners are asked to listen without having to worry about speaking, they are better at
recognizing the sounds because they are under less pressure. Thus, it is likely that they
will be able to produce correct sounds even without receiving explicit pronunciation
instruction.
Other methods, namely Audiolingualism in the US and the Oral Approach in Britain
during the 1940s and 1950s have another way to treat pronunciation. In the class,
pronunciation is very important and is taught explicitly from the start. The teacher (or a
recording) models a sound, or an utterance and students are asked to repeat it. The
difference between Audiolingualism and Direct Method lies in the feature that in
Audiolingualism class, beside the model, the teacher also takes advantage of a number of
teaching aids such as phonetic description, or the transcription system. The most common
technique that is used to teach pronunciation is the minimal pair drills. Learners are asked
to distinguish between two different sounds that might sound similar by listening to the
teacher or a tape recorder. This listening discrimination is followed by oral practice.
During the 1970s, the Silent Way came to public attention. In classes applying this
method, accurate pronunciation is a focus from the very beginning. The teacher speaks as
little as possible, but takes advantage of gestures to indicate what the students should do.
S/he can do this with the aid of a number of tools such as a sound-colour chart, the Fidel
charts, word charts, and colored rods.
Another method that also came into being during the 1970s was the Community

2000: 16). These two forms are actually the two phases of the same technique. Normally,
at first, the whole class repeats after certain sounds and phrases. After a certain amount of
class-drilling, individual student take turns and pronounce those items on his/her own.
* Phonetic training: This technique makes use of articulatory descriptions, articulatory
diagrams and a phonetic alphabet. Learners are provided with basic theoretical knowledge
about how sounds are formed. They are also aided by the teacher to make genuine sound
production. However, this kind of technique is not supposed to teach to too young
learners as it is unlikely that they are able to comprehend such a complicated matter.
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* Minimal pair drills: These relate to words which differ by only one phoneme.
Normally, learners are allowed to listen to the tape and distinguish between the two
sounds. This type of activities is particularly useful to teach sounds which cause
difficulties for learners or sounds that are easily mismatched. After listening, learners are
asked to produce the sounds themselves.
* Contextualized minimal pairs: When minimal pair drills seem a bit boring and too
theoretical with separated sounds, their contextualization compensates for this weakness.
The sentence stem serves as a basis for students to produce appropriate responses with
correct pronunciation. When words are put in sentences, it seems to be more useful than
the vague minimal pairs because it is more practical.
* Tongue twisters: When other techniques look serious and sometimes put learners under
much pressure, tongue twisters provide a more delighting way to learn pronunciation.
Sounds which are difficult to differentiate are put together to make meaningful sentences.
This technique rooted from speech correction strategies for native speakers. One of the
most typical examples for this technique is the sentence, “She sells seashells by the
seashore.”
* Practice of vowel shifts and stress shifts related by affixation: This is a useful
technique in which students are taught how stress and vowel shift by affixation. Many
learners have the habit of pronounce a new-formed word according to the pronunciation
of the root one. For example, they tend to pronounce the sounds of Exhibition like the
sound of Exhibit. With the help of the teacher, learners are more aware of some rules for

1/ Vowel sounds and consonant sounds
The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning "uttering voice" or
"speaking". Vowels usually form the peak or nucleus of a syllable, whereas consonants
form the onset and coda. Vowels can be defined as “sounds in the production of which
there is no obstruction to the flow of air as it passes the larynx to the lips” (Roach,
2000:10). According to Roach (1998), vowels can be classified in terms of:
(1) The height of the bulk of the tongue in the mouth
(2) The front/back position of the tongue in the mouth
(3) The degree of lip-rounding
(4) The length of vowels
(Roach, 1998: 13-14)
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As for consonant sounds, Roach (2000:10) defined them as “sounds in which there is
obstruction to the flow of air as it passes the larynx to the lips.” As consonant sounds
were the main issue of this research, we would like to propose the classification of
English consonant sounds in Table 1 below.
Table 1: English consonant sounds
Bilabial Labio
dental
Dental Alveolar Palato-
alveolar
Palatal Velar Glotal
Plosive + b
- p
+ d
- t
+ g
- k
Fricative + v + ð + z
- s

goes up and down in pitch when we are speaking. It plays a vital role in helping people
express their opinions, as well as understanding thoughts of others. Intonation is such a
sensitive issue that it involves practice rather than theory. Therefore, it is always
necessary to have a certain context to decide what words to stress and how to raise a
specific part of an utterance. Learners have to be made fully aware of the fact that despite
how correct their grammar is, their wrong intonation may cause misinterpretation to the
listeners. In addition, one sentence’s meaning can be altered by different types of
intonation a speaker uses. Thus, learners should be taught how to achieve sensible
intonation so as not to let it interfere with the meaning of what they really want to say.
However, it is not an easy task to teach intonation to learners as it is largely affected by a
number of factors, among which one of the most important factors is the learners’
competence of language. If a learner is unable to find an appropriate word in time due to
his lack of vocabulary, then he cannot have a smooth intonation. This results from the fact
that he will have to spend a certain amount of time to think of a particular word.
4/ Other aspects of connected speech
The master of pronouncing English sounds is not enough to achieve good pronunciation
as it is a complicated issue. Apart from the individual sounds, learners have to be
competent on the use of intonation and a vast number of other aspects relating to
connected speech. If English is spoken in a very careful and slow way, such as when
delivering a speech, or having a lecture, these aspects do not appear much. They are most
used in casual and rapid, everyday speech. That is the reason why it is much more
difficult to teach learners these aspects in the class, where the environment for listening to
authentic communication is limited.
* Assimilation
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Kelly (2000) defines assimilation as the modification of sounds on each other when they
meet, usually across word boundaries, but can also within words. Assimilation is said to
be progressive when a sound influences a following sound, or regressive when a sound
influences one which precedes it. In other words, this means in the preparation steps for
pronouncing a coming sound, the previous sound is often altered. It is not pronounced in

We cannot judge students’ pronunciation without regarding the model of pronunciation
that we apply during the teaching process.
According to Kelly (2000), in the past, the model for teaching English pronunciation was
usually Received Pronunciation (RP), which is the pronunciation of people in the
southeast England. Whereas other kinds of accent usually say something about the
geographical regions, RP is different in the way that it is perceived as the accent that
shows a person’s status and education.
However, today, there are a vast number of English, such as American English,
Australian English, etc. They are also employed in all fields of life. Even within countries
where English is the native language, it has a great number of variables. Take the UK, for
example, people in the North and in the South have different accents.
Thus, it is vital to decide what model of English pronunciation to teach, and for what
reasons the teacher makes such a decision. However, the truth is that the teacher himself
is often unable to produce a “perfect” accent without being affected by his own language.
Some teachers may modify their accents, but actually this can only be to some certain
extend. Another troublesome problem is that one student is taught by many teachers, with
different accent. In addition, each student may have his/her own preference due to some
inner motivation. Some of them may want to study Australian English because they wish
to study further in Australia, for example. Therefore, it is virtually impossible to state
what is the “correct accent”, what is not. Normally, the teacher would allow the students
to choose whatever accent they want to develop, provided that it is widely
comprehensible. The teacher should teach the accent that they can use the best, and
adequately inform students about the existence of other varieties.
2.2.4 Intelligibility
Apart from identifying clearly the kind of pronunciation that will by employed and taught
to students, another important issue that needs raising is the question of the pronunciation
goal, i.e. the level of pronunciation required from the learners. Locke and Latham (1990)
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claims that human action is caused by purposes, and goals have to be set and pursued by
choice so as for the action to take place. Without a clear goal in mind, people do not know

1/ The native language
It is inevitable that learners’ native language has a great impact on their ability of
pronouncing English. The “foreign accent” is therefore easy to identify. Even in some
cases, it is possible to identify what country and what region a speaker comes from based
on his/her way of pronouncing English. Furthermore, the native language may cause
difficulties, as well as advantages for learners. Take Vietnamese learners, for example,
learning English may be easier than learning Chinese, because of the fact that both
English and Vietnamese are Latin ones, whereas Chinese is a hieroglyphic language.
However, some English sounds do not exist in Vietnamese such as /ʒ/, /∫/, /θ/, /ð/.
Therefore, many Vietnamese learners are unable to produce those sounds correctly.
2/ The age factor
It is often assumed that the younger a person starts learning foreign languages, the better
he is at pronouncing it and therefore, a greater chance of having a native-like accent.
Oyama (1976) conducted a research whose subjects were sixty male Italian-born
immigrants. They were tape-recorded reading aloud a short paragraph and telling a story
about a frightening episode in their lives (completely unprepared or rehearsed). Their
pronunciation was judged by two experts based on a five point scale, ranging from “no
foreign accent” to “heavy foreign accent”. The results showed that the younger a person
was when he started learning English, the more native-like was his accent.
Nevertheless, other researches showed opposite results. Snow and Hoefnagel-Hohle
(1975) conducted a research which had two parts. The first part was a laboratory study in
which 136 subjects (British English people who were learning Dutch as a second
language in Holland) were asked to listen and imitate five Dutch words. The results
showed that the two oldest groups of learners (eight 17-year-olds and seven 21-31-year-
olds) had the highest achievement, whereas the youngest groups had the lowest scores
(ten 5-year-olds and ten 6-year-olds). The second part was a long-term study in which the
subjects were tested in much the same way at intervals during their first year of studying
Dutch. This time, at first, older learners seemed to get better results. However, after four
to five months, there seemed to be no significant age difference among the results of
those subjects.

also in the people and the culture of that language as well. In this case, the teacher may
increase the learners’ positive attitude towards the foreign language by providing vivid
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information about that language’s culture, or making use of authentic materials to make
the lessons more interesting.
6/ Motivation and concern for good pronunciation
It is essential that in order to learn a language in general, and pronunciation in particular,
motivation plays a vital role. If learners really care much about their pronunciation, they
will become more careful with their speaking, and gradually build up good pronunciation
competence. Moreover, it is the truth that many students have great concern for their
pronunciation. They always seek for feedback from the teacher on how they speak.
Sometimes, it is the fact that they feel unable to pronounce a word correctly that inhibits
them from the desire to speak any more.
7/ The teacher’s role
In teaching pronunciation, the teacher is expected to play an important role in guiding and
helping learners. According to Kenworthy (1987: 1), the teacher has to perform the
following roles:
* Helping learners hear: The teacher has a mission to provide appropriate input of the
target sounds for learners to hear. If such a provision is not available, learners are likely to
have misconceptions about the target language and perceive the sounds in a wrong way.
Thus, they will be unable to produce genuine sounds and utterances.
* Helping learners make sounds: It is true that some English sounds do not exist in the
learners’ mother tongue. Some learners may be able to imitate the target sounds if they
are provided models. However, for those who lack such ability, it is the teacher’s task to
explain the way those difficult sounds are made and provide aid to help learners produce
correct sounds.
* Providing feedback: Like any other aspect of teaching, feedback is very important in the
sense that it helps learners know where they are standing, how much they have gained
and what they need to improve. As for pronunciation, this is of vital importance because
in many cases, learners may make overgeneralization about the way English is

of behavior; for example, verbal or facial signals which listeners give to speakers to
indicate that they understand what the speaker is saying.” In teaching, feedback is defined
as “comments or information learner receive on the success of a learning task, either from
the teacher or from other learners.”
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Feedback plays an essential role in any language learning and teaching environment.
Without proper feedback from the teacher, learners would be at a loss of specifying their
own position in the process of studying a foreign language. Davies (2000) stated that
“Specific, descriptive feedback that focuses on success and points the way to
improvement has a positive effect.” He also pointed out that the purpose of providing
feedback is to “provide opportunities for the learner to make adjustments and
improvements toward mastery of a specified standard.”
A further investigation finds out that there are some kinds of feedback, also specified in
the dictionary, namely auditory feedback, delayed auditory feedback and kinesthetic
feedback. As for the purpose of the research, for the sake of improving the students’
pronunciation, we would like to present the first two ones.
When a person speaks, they can hear what they are saying, and can use this information to
monitor their speech and to correct any mistakes. This is called auditory feedback.
This means this is a type of feedback that comes from the learners themselves, or we may
call self-feedback. It is particularly common in speaking. When students make some
mistakes, they discover it immediately after they speak. Then, they provide correction
immediately. This type of feedback does not involve the role of the teacher. For example,
one student says:
“I would like a room for two nights /laits/.”
She may discover that she has mispronounced night right at the time she speaks.
Then, she can continue to say “I mean nights. /naits/”
Another type of feedback which we find particularly effective in the teaching and learning
of pronunciation is delayed auditory feedback. This is “a technique which shows how
speakers depend on auditory feedback (i.e. hearing what have just said) when speaking. In
studies of delayed auditory feedback, speakers wear earphones through which they hear

Despite the inevitable importance of feedback, there have been very few researches
focusing on the use of feedback to improve students’ performance. Most of the researches
so far have been largely exploiting other aspects such as assessment or testing. Feedback
seems to be ignored. This may be explainable for two reasons. First, feedback is
something that teachers do everyday. It is the normal task of the teacher to provide
feedback to his/her students. Therefore, maybe it is such a familiar concept that many
people think does not worth looking at. The second reason may come from the fact that
feedback is actually a very complicated concept. Despite its clear and evident meaning,
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there are various types of feedback, and the questions of which feedback types is the most
suitable in a specific situation, or how should teachers provide feedback to students are
not easy to answer.
2.4.2 Research into the use of corrective feedback
The term corrective feedback is considered by some researchers to be rooted from the
Output Hypothesis proposed by Swain (1985). When conducting a research in a class
where school students learn French, she found out that despite the fact that the students
hardly encountered any difficulties in understanding the teacher’s instructions in French,
their production often lacked accuracy. Therefore, she came to a conclusion, which is the
Output Hypothesis, that “comprehensive input alone does not improve learners’ language
acquisition in terms of syntax,” and “the production of output in response to input is
necessary for further language development.” She also argued that modified output is
necessary for second language mastery. Furthermore, modified output could result from
the ample opportunities for output and the provision of useful and consistent feedback
from teachers and peers. More specifically, modified output can be a form of learner
uptake, or learner reaction to corrective feedback given to learners’ error. Therefore,
corrective feedback can be regarded as “a pedagogical means of offering modified input
to students, which could consequently lead to modified output by the students.”
Following this research, Long (1985) clarified the relationship between input, teacher-
learner interaction and acquisition as follows:
(1) interactional modification makes input comprehensible

to what degree learners perceive corrective feedback from the teacher. Mackey et al.
(2000) made an interesting discovery after conducting a research over 17 non-native
speakers. According to the results, learners were more accurate in perceiving lexical,
semantic and phonological feedback, but they were less accurate in perceiving
morphosyntactic one. They also found that morphosyntactic errors were mostly received
recasts, whereas negotiation of form (elicitation, clarification request, repetition of the
error, and metalinguistic feedback) mostly occurred in response to phonological errors.
Therefore, they pointed out that there was a relationship between learner errors’ types and
feedback types, and between feedback types and learner perception.
From the literature review, we can see that despite the fact that feedback plays a vital role
in the learning of a second language, there is still not enough persuasive research
evidence to justify its effect on the students’ performance. As for pronunciation, the effect
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of feedback has not been adequately exploited. This, once again, motivated us to carry out
a research on it.
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