v

TABLE OF CONTENT

CANDIDATE’S STATEMENT. Error! Bookmark not defined.
ABSTRACT Error! Bookmark not defined.i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii
PREFACE iError! Bookmark not defined.
TABLE OF CONTENT…………………………………………………………………… …v
LIST OF TABLES. Error! Bookmark not defined.i
LIST OF FIGURES ix
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1
1.1. Rationale to the Study 2
1.2. Objectives of the Study. 2
1.3. Research questions. 2
1.4. The scope of the study. 3
1.5. Organization of the Study. 3
CHAPTER 2: REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE 4
2.1. Some main features of pronunciation teaching. 4
2.1.1 The importance of pronunciation and pronunciation teaching. 4
2.1.2 Models of pronunciation 5
2.1.3 Intelligibility 7
2.2. Approaches of the teaching of pronunciation 8
2.2.1 Bottom-up and top-down approach. 8
2.2.2 Intuitive-imitative and Analytic-linguistic approach. 9
2.2.3 Communicative approach. 9
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2.2.4 An integrated approach. Error! Bookmark not defined.
2.3. Integrating pronunciation into listening Error! Bookmark not defined.
2.4. Empirical research on the integration of pronunciation into listening. Error! Bookmark
viii
LIST OF TABLES. Table 1.1 Comparison of the scores in the pre-test and week-2 progress test.
Table 1.2 Comparison of the scores in the pre-test and week-4 progress test.
Table 1.3 Comparison of the scores in the pre-test and week- 6 progress test.

Figure 2.5 Students’ likeness of integrating stress and intonation into listening lessons.
Figure 2.6 Students’ opinions about the appropriation of lesson design.
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale to the Study
To many learners, learning English is very difficult because of many differences between it
and Vietnamese. Pronunciation is considered as one of the most difficult one. It is the biggest
challenge because a word pronounced incorrectly may lead to misunderstandings of listeners.
These sometimes bring unexpected effects or even break communication.
The approaches to teaching pronunciation have been changed according to the EFL teaching
methodological changes. However, EFL teachers still face up with many problems in finding

2. To examine the attitudes of Vietnamese learners of English about the integration of
pronunciation elements into listening lessons.
3. Research questions.
The researcher aims at answering the two research questions:
a. What are the effects of the integration of pronunciation elements into listening
lessons to students’ pronunciation?
b. What are the students’ attitudes toward and perceptions of the integration of
pronunciation elements into listening lessons?
4. The scope of the study.
This is an action research with a focused group of 45 students in Backan Community
College. This study was aimed exploring how the integration of pronunciation elements into
listening lessons affect students‟ performance in pronunciation.
3

5. Organization of the Study.
The thesis is structured in five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the study. It includes the
objectives, the scope, and the significance of the study.
Chapter 2 provides a review of the literature on the approaches to pronunciation teaching with
a focus on an integrated approach to pronunciation teaching, i.e., integrating pronunciation
into listening lessons.
Chapter 3 presents the research methodology and the instruments used to collect data.
Chapter 4 presents the results of the study, along with analysis and discussion of the data.
Chapter 5 offers a summary of the findings of the study, conclusions, and suggestions for
future research.

vocabulary might be. (p7)
5

She goes on to argue that the focus on language communication leads to “the urgency
to the teaching of pronunciation”. Hewings (2004) argues that an understandable
pronunciation plays an important role to the students‟ communication skills and therefore
pronunciation teaching should be integrated into other areas of language work. Generally
speaking, there is no need in turning learners sounding like native speakers but teachers do
need to get them to be capable of being understood by a variety of listeners.
It is believed that teaching the right pronunciation of English to the learners is very important,
so that they may communicate exactly what and how they want to communicate.
Pronunciation is one of the most difficult areas for learners, as well as for teachers but their
intelligibility can be greatly improved by effective pronunciation teaching. Goodwin (2001)
claims that “the teaching of pronunciation is so crucial to our students.”(p17). According to
Pennington(1989), teachers who are trained formally in pronunciation and teaching
suprasegmentals in communicative language program can create a difference of learners‟
pronunciation. Harmer (2001) also argues that pronunciation teaching not only helps students
to be aware of different sounds and sound features but also improve their speaking
immeasurably. Subsequently, he claims
concentrating on sounds, showing where they are made in mouth, making students
aware of where words should be stressed- all these things give them extra information
about spoken English and help them achieve the goal of improved comprehension and
intelligibility. (p183).
In short, all the researchers have an agreement on the role of the teaching of pronunciation and
encourage teachers to play the role as facilitators in students‟ pronunciation learning.
2.1.2 Models of pronunciation
The choice of a pronunciation model for L2 learners has become an important issue among
teachers and educators concerned with teaching English. They have tried to answer the
question to what extent models of pronunciation should be explored to teach pronunciation.
6

“American English pronunciation includes three major areas, ie eastern, southern and
the rest of the country. The pronunciation in the rest of the country is particularly
uniform and labeled General American English.”
(p.164).
Brown ( 1994) states that Scottish English even with a much smaller number of native
speakers( only 5 millions) and has little influence in other part of English-speaking world.
However, he points out that a reasonable homogeneity exists between typical accents of
English in Scotland, such that a category of SE can be used.( p.36)
Even the diversity of how English is pronounced is real but what is common to all speakers of
English (the commonality) is much greater. Thus, it is believed that the ultimate target of both
the teaching and the learning of ESL pronunciation would be an intelligible accent. Because
There is no problem in allowing a distance exist between what is presented to the learner
(model) and an acceptable achieved performance by the learner‟ ( Brown,1994, p. 40). Thus,
teachers must choose the appropriate materials for pronunciation teaching to help students to
be understood by varieties of listeners.
2.1.3 Intelligibility
Some teachers claim that pronunciation teaching is discouraging because they believe that
students should achieve native-like pronunciation, but very few learners can do that. In fact,
many of these learners master the elements of language such as syntax, morphology, or even
semantics but often fail to master phonology. But it is worth emphasizing the fact that native-
like pronunciation should not be the goal for pronunciation teaching. The major difficulty
facing almost any ESL/EFL learner is the achievement of acceptable pronunciation that
enables them to be understood by the L1 English speakers.
8

According to Kenworthy (1987:3) „ for the majority of learners a far more reasonable goal is
to be comfortably intelligible . Intelligibility is the degree to which a listener can be
understand what is being said, or in the words of Kenworthy (1987) “Intelligibility is being
understood by a listener at a given time in a given situation”( p13). Following the same ideas,
Harmer (2001) also agrees that a „perfect’ pronunciation is achieved extremely rarely by

rhythms and sounds of the language and no explicit information is intervened. The quality of
phonograph records, tape records and language labs in the mid-twentieth century, and more
recently of audio-videocassettes and compact disc are considered to be good models for
learners. The second approach is believed to complement the first approach. Teachers use
information and tools such as alphabet, articulatory descriptions, charts of the vocal apparatus,
contrastive information and other supplementary materials to provide explicit information to
the learners and attention to the sounds and rhythm.
2.2.3 Communicative approach.
Since the communicative language teaching has been rising, there were tendencies of a
communicative approach to pronunciation teaching. In the past, the teaching of pronunciation
is concerned much with practicing isolated sounds or stress and intonation patterns without
considering the context in which these sounds and patterns produced. However, there has been
a change from the teaching of segmentals (individual vowel and consonant sounds) to the
teaching of suprasegmentals (stress, rhythm, and intonation). Other authors including Jones &
Evans( 1995:224) suggest that teachers still have different ways to present pronunciation
communicatively with most teaching materials. 10

2.3.4 An integrated approach.
The pronunciation teaching is not an end in itself, as it is closely intertwined with listening and
speaking skills, as well as with other language areas such as grammar and vocabulary. Most
literature supports the views of an integrated approach to pronunciation teaching in which it is
combined with other language works.
According to Chera Flores (2001), it is very important to apply an integrated approach in
pronunciation teaching because
… the integration of pronunciation into other language activities from the beginning
stages of learning and throughout a complete program would allow the learner to reach
stage of phonological development suggested as necessary to achieve results from

(1990) and Murphy (1991) as discussed above.
In this sense, the researcher would go along with the views that pronunciation should be
integrated into listening and speaking skills development. And teachers should identify and
deal with their learners´ immediate pronunciation needs regarding the aural-oral activities of
the language course.
2.3. Integrating pronunciation into listening
With regard to the integration of pronunciation elements into listening, most researchers deal
with how and why the teaching affects students‟ improvement of pronunciation.
Gilbert (1990) presents his ideas about the connection between listening and pronunciation. To
his views, pronunciation is an important aspect of both speaking and listening and an
understandable pronunciation is crucial to their communication skills. Thus, teachers should
integrate it with other areas of language work.
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Moreover, he recommended that authentic unscripted recordings from the cassettes can be
used in an effective way which explores the recordings as natural speech to raise the students‟
awareness of elements of connected speech and realize the crucial relation between developing
pronunciation and listening skills.
Murphy (1991) states that Increasing numbers of ESL methodologists argue that L2
pronunciation practice needs to be intimately linked with the listening process (p. 285).
According to Kelly (2003), teachers should consider the noticing process which affects
students‟ achievement of L2 pronunciation. When pronunciation study and listening activities
are combined, students will notice things about the language and its use better. The concept of
noticing is crucial in pronunciation work. Jones (1997) has pointed out “Listening will
continue to play a large part in pronunciation training, with perhaps more authentic listening
tasks with a variety of accents.” (p. 185)
In general, it can be concluded that most researchers supported the integration of
pronunciation into listening for the following advantages: the authentic materials for
pronunciation practice, the development of the students‟ awareness of elements of connected
speech and the contribution to the noticing process which supports students in pronunciation

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This chapter presents the context of the study, the subjects of the study, the procedure of data
collection.
The aim of the study, as stated in Chapter 1, is to examine whether or not the teaching of
integrating pronunciation elements into listening lessons is effective with students at Backan
Community College. In order to measure the effectiveness of the intervention, the researcher
decided to conduct an experimental research. The research methodology for this aspect of the
study was a pre-experimental design (One-group pretest-posttest design). The pre-test were
therefore utilized to assess the pronunciation ability of stress and intonation of the students
prior to the study. Then, students did the six progress tests and the post-test. The dependent
variable was the scores on the tests. The scores were compared to measure to the effects of the
treatment on students‟ pronunciation.
In order to evaluate the students‟ attitudes toward and the perceptions of students on the
teaching, the questionnaires were given to the students after the intervention.
3.1 The context of the study
Backan Community College is a local public college located in the North of Vietnam. The
number of students in each class remains about 45-70 students. The classroom for English
lessons is not equipped with multimedia facilities. The teachers only used cassette players for
listening lessons.
The Department of English in the college has a teaching staff of 6 permanent members and a
student body of approximately 500. Each teacher must follow a set of guidelines with regard
to the content, focus and duration of a course. Teachers have the freedom to make decisions
concerning appropriate teaching approach and methodology to use. All the materials using for
teaching and learning are the text book “New Headway” by John & Liz Soars (2000) and
cassettes attached. In the textbook, four macro language skills are equally developed.
However, pronunciation is not focused as much as other skills.
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In Backan Community College, students are majored in different subjects to become teachers

3.3. Instruments
Two research tools were used in this study: the tests( pre-test, post-test and progress tests) and
the questionnaires.
3.3.1 The tests.
There are three kind of test including the pre-test, post-test and progress test. The tests were
designed by the researcher. The words and sentences in both the test were picked out from the
conversations in listening tasks in New Headway Elementary. Each test was designed with
three main tasks: Task 1 required students to mark the word stress of twenty random words
and then put them into three categories (First-syllable, second- syllable and third- syllable
stress); Task 2 required students to mark the sentence stress; Task 3 required students to
discriminate two kinds of intonation of given sentences (the rise and the fall).
The pre-test was administrated to measure the students‟ ability of pronunciation performance
before the intervention.
The post-test was designed with the selected words and sentences from the pronunciation
practice during twelve weeks in order to measure the students‟ ability of pronunciation
performance after the intervention.
The six progress tests contained the words and sentences from the ones practiced during two
previous weeks. (Week 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12)
3. 3.2 Questionnaires (see Appendix 5)
At the end of the twelve-week intervention, once all the pronunciation practices and tests had
been completed, the questionnaires were administrated to get more information about their
attitudes of the treatment and their perception of its effects on their improvement of
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pronunciation. The questionnaire includes three main parts. The first part contains different
items related to the students‟ attitudes and perceptions toward English pronunciation learning.
The second part contains three items related to the intervention applied in 12 weeks. The third
part is for three open questions for other opinions related to the intervention.
The questionnaires includes three main categories: (a) Attitudes toward studying English
pronunciation, (b) Attitudes toward the teaching of pronunciation by integrating it into

S1: Down
Teacher: Do you agree? Ok( Marks the board: ……………
The analysis of the dialogue helped students to pay attention on these linguistic features and in
the next lessons; they would be likely to recognize similar features. Teacher did a quicker
version in the following lessons in which students are familiar with the steps.
Stage 2: Practice
Students practiced the dialogues among group members and individual. Teacher called some
pairs to present the conversations.
Stage 3: Production.
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Teacher gave some other similar words and sentences and asked students to pronounce with
the correct stress and intonation. Teacher listened and examined how they could apply what
they had learnt in new sentences and conversations
3.4.2 The tests.
a/ The pretest and post test.
The pretest was administrated to the students at the second week of the second semester. The
teacher collected the pretest for the score analysis.
After 12 weeks of treatment, the post test was given to check the extent to which the students
improve their ability in producing stress and intonation. The score of post test was used to
compare with the scores of pretest to justify the students‟ improvement after the teaching.
b/ Six progress tests
During the 12 weeks of treatment, there were six tests which aim at exploring how the scores
changed after 12 weeks. The tests were administrated after every two week (Week 2, 4, 6, 8,
10 and 12).
3.4.3 Questionnaires
The questionnaires were delivered to the students after the intervention. The researcher
collected the data for further analysis.
3
9.4%
( 5 ≤ < 7)
13
40.6%
14
43.8%
( 3 < < 5)
8
25.0%
8
25.0%
( ≤ 3)
8
25.0%
7
21.9%
Total
32
100.0%
32
100.0%

Mean ± SD
4.53 ± 1.39
4.63 ± 1.39

Max
7
7