VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES
   ĐÀO THÚY MAI A STUDY ON SOME COMMON MISTAKES MADE BY
VIETNAMESE LEARNERS OF ENGLISH WHEN
PRONOUNCING ENGLISH FINAL CONSONANTS

(Nghiên cứu một số lỗi thường gặp của học viên Việt Nam khi phát
âm phụ âm cuối trong tiếng Anh) M.A. MINOR THESIS Field: English Linguistics
Code: 60.22.15 HANOI, 2012
VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES
  
LIST OF FIGURES vi
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION 1
1. RATIONALE 1
2. AIMS OF THE RESEARCH 2
3. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 2
4. SCOPE OF THE STUDY 3
5. DESIGN OF THE STUDY 4
PART TWO: DEVELOPMENT 5
Chapter 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW 5
I. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 5
I.1. General descriptions of stop consonants 5
I.2. Phonological characteristics and articulation of the sounds /p/, b/, /t/, /d/, /k/ and
/g/ 6
I.3. Vietnamese final stop consonants vs. English final stop consonants 10
II. LITERATURE REVIEW 11
Chapter 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 19
2.1. Research questions 19
2.2. The informants of the study 19
2.3. Research method 20
Chapter 3: DATA ANALYSIS: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS 23
3.1. The recordings 23
3.2. The survey questionnaire 29
PART THREE: CONCLUSION 38
1. Summary 38
2. Concluding remarks 38
3. Pedagogical Implications 41
4. Limitations and Suggestions for further research 42
REFERENCES 43
APPENDIX 1 I


learners‟ speaking English
Figure 11: Percentage of informants applying pronunciation strategies Figure 12: Informants‟ ideas about their teachers‟ pronunciation teaching
strategies
1 PART ONE: INTRODUCTION
1. RATIONALE
Our world is developing every hour and international cooperation is one of the important
strategies of each country to promote its socio-economic development. To integrate
successfully into the global economy, foreign language is considered to be indispensable.
Understanding the importance of foreign languages in general and of English in
particular, the Vietnamese government has set up a curriculum for English learning for
children from 6 years old onwards. The number of English language centers has been
remarkably increasing during the past two decades. Whereas English is an urgent
requirement for young graduates to get a good job, many of them find it difficult to speak

learners in general and for senior year non- English major students in particular if they do
not find the most suitable study method for themselves. In this study, the author
investigates the most common mistakes made by those learners to:
 Identify the most common mistakes in pronouncing English final consonants: /p/,
/b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, and /g/ by senior non-English major students at Thai Nguyen
University of Economics and Business Administration;
 Find out the causes of these mistakes;
 Provide some strategies to help students avoid mispronunciation.
Hopefully, this research will provide one more reference source for teachers of English as
a second language when they teach pronunciation. At the same time, this will also be
useful to Vietnamese students of English in correcting their mistakes and improving
pronunciation skills.
3. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Research questions
The study addresses the following four questions:
1. Do Vietnamese learners of English make mistakes when pronouncing
English final stop consonants?
2. What are the most common mistakes students often make?
3. What are the causes of the mispronunciation?

3 4. What are the possible solutions to help learners correct these mistakes?
Research context
The research was conducted on 150 senior English non- major students of joint training
program between Thai Nguyen University of Economics and Business Administration
and Daegu Cyber University. These students had a lot of chances to improve their English
proficiency because most of the courses were taught in English.
Research method

the most common mistakes are sound omission and sound deviation. The said
reasons have motivated me to carry out this study to find out the mistakes as well as
to offer strategies to help students to overcome this problem.
5. DESIGN OF THE STUDY
The thesis comprises three parts:
The first part is the introduction which includes the rationale, aims, research
methodology, scope and design of the study.
The second part, development, is divided into three chapters. Chapter one provides the
theoretical background and literature review of the study. The theoretical background
presents the general description of stop consonants, the phonological characteristics and
articulation of the sounds /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/ and /g/ and a comparison between
Vietnamese final consonants and English final consonants. The literature review discusses
previous works related to consonant pronunciation among second language learners.
Chapter two is devoted to the methodology of the study in which the research questions
are raised, the informants of the study are discussed and the research method is given with
the data collection instruments, the data analysis methods and data collection procedure.
Chapter 3, data analysis: findings and discussion, analyses the data collected from the
recordings and the questionnaire and presents the findings and discussion of the study.
The final part is the conclusion including a summary of the study, concluding remarks,
pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research.

5 PART TWO: DEVELOPMENT
Chapter 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter provides some key concepts as the theoretical background for the research.

velar
stops

vcls
p t

k
vd
b d

g
Table 1: Stop consonants chart
(Vcls = voiceless vd = voiced)
Avery and Ehrlich (2010:26)