VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES
BÙI VĂN KHIẾT
THE USE OF ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION WEBSITES FOR
IMPROVING GRADE 10 STUDENTS’ PRONUNCIATION

(SỬ DỤNG CÁC TRANG WEB PHÁT ÂM ĐỂ CẢI THIỆN
NĂNG LỰC PHÁT ÂM CỦA HỌC SINH LỚP 10) MA MINOR THESIS

FIELD: ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY
CODE: 601410

1. Rationale
1
2. Aims of the study
3
3. Scope of the study
3
4. Research questions/ Hypotheses
3
5. Research methods
4
6. Significance of the study
4
7. Organizations of the study
5
CHAPTER 1. LITERATURE REVIEW

1.1. Teaching pronunciation
7
1.2. Pronunciation as an aspect of communicative competence
9
1.2.1 Consonants and vowels
11
1.2.2 Word stress
11
1.3. Pronunciation websites
12
1.4. Theoretical background of technology and websites application
in language teaching
13
1.5. Advantages and disadvantages of using pronunciation websites

25
2.6. Data collection procedure
26
2.7. Marking
29
2.8. Data analysis procedure
29
CHAPTER 3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

3.1. The one-tail t-test (one-sample t-test)
30
3.1.1 Control group
30
3.1.2 Experimental group
31
3.2. The two-tail t-test (two-sample t-test)
33
3.3. The questionnaire
35
3.4. Observation and diaries
36
3.5. Discussion
37
CONCLUSION

1. Major findings of the research
38
2. Implications
39
3. Limitations
LIST OF ABBREVIATION

MCQs: Multiple Choice Questions
ESL: English as a Second Language
EFL: English as a Foreign Language
LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: The table illustrates the research design adapted in this study.
Table 2: One-tail t-test for control group (Listening test)
Table 3: One-tail t-test for control group (Speaking test)
Table 4: One-tail t-test for experimental group (Listening test)
Table 5: One-tail t-test for experimental group (Speaking test)
Table 6: Two-tail t-test for control group and experimental group (Listening test)
Table 7: Two-tail t-test for control group and experimental group (Speaking test)

LIST OF DIAGRAMS AND CHARTS

all.
The reason for this may firstly be due to geographical positions where they
live, which belongs to the sociolinguistics. Another explanation for this could lie in
the introduction of Multiple Choice Exams for English, which surely have an
influence on students’ learning style in which speaking, listening and pronunciation
are never paid enough attention. However, the root of the issues is believed to be the
current technique of teaching pronunciation as well as the method of assessing.
2

Students are encouraged to learn the pronunciation by rules or sometimes listen to
and imitate the teacher's pronunciation of single words and limited sentence drills
and when assessing, paper tests with MCQs are employed. Many teachers claim that
the classes are too crowded (from 45-55) so they do not have time to correct
students’ pronunciation mistakes. In addition, there is not a separate period for
pronunciation instruction, just about 15 minutes for every 5 periods, therefore they
have to teach to the test, if not, their students will not get high scores in the exams
and their reputation as well as their emulation titles will be lost.
When observing teachers’ lessons, the researcher found that many teachers
have difficulties in producing good English, some even pronounce with wrong
sounds or stress. This may be due to the fact that they are not well-trained and
qualified enough. According to the results of the English Competence Survey
Exams for English teachers in 2011, only 05 out of 389 high school teachers in Nam
Dinh province got C1 (the requirement of the Ministry of Education and Training -
5
th
level in the Common European Framework). The survey results also revealed
that the teachers are particularly weak in listening and speaking skills, which surely
affect their teaching of pronunciation.
The researcher has taken this matter into consideration a lot. The students
seem not eager to learn pronunciation and feel shy to correct their mistakes every

(two meetings a week, each meeting lasts 90 minutes).
4. Research questions
This study is guided by the following research questions.
1. To what extent does the use of pronunciation websites help class 10 Maths
1 students at Le Hong Phong Gifted High School improve their pronunciation?
2. Is the use of pronunciation websites more effective than conventional
technique of teaching pronunciation to class 10 Maths 1 students?
3. How do the students of class 10 Maths 1 feel about the use of
pronunciation websites for improving their pronunciation?
4

Null hypothesis 1 (Ho1): The use of pronunciation websites does not help
improve class 10 Maths 1 students’ pronunciation.
Null hypothesis 2 (Ho2): The use of pronunciation websites is not more
effective than conventional technique of teaching pronunciation to class 10 Maths 1
students.
Null hypothesis 3 (Ho3): Class 10 Maths 1 students have negative attitudes
towards the use of pronunciation websites.
5. Research methods
The aims of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of using websites
for students’ improvement in pronunciation, therefore an experimental design is
applied. In addition, the researcher made a careful selection of the subjects of the
study and controlled other extraneous variables such as students’ gender, age, the
teacher carrying out the lessons, teaching contents…, hence the study is a quasi-
experiment in nature.
In this research, both qualitative and quantitative methods are used to analyse
the data.
Quantitative method:
The range of mathematical and statistical techniques used to analyse data. In
this research, it is used to analyse the data collected from the pre-tests and post-tests

CHAPTER 1. LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter summarizes fundamental and theoretical backgrounds and
concepts related to the topic of the study by earlier authors. It deals with the
importance of pronunciation in teaching and learning English as well as positive
and negative attitudes, remarks and previous results of using websites in language
instruction.
CHAPTER 2. METHODOLOGY
This chapter not only provides the setting of the study, the subjects and
instruments for collecting data but also presents the data collection and data analysis
procedures.
6

CHAPTER 3. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS
The findings of the tests, questionnaire, diaries, observations as well as
recordings are presented in this chapter.
CONCLUSION
This part summarizes some major findings, provides recommendations for
classroom practice, limitations of the study and suggestions for further research.

instruction is becoming more and more popular and we certainly need more
confirmation from other researches and studies to support their effectiveness.
1.1. Teaching pronunciation
There have been various definitions of pronunciation by different authors.
Dalton & Seidlhofer (2003) defined pronunciation as the production of significant
sounds. According to Hornby (2003), “Pronunciation is the way in which a
language or a particular word or sound is pronounced.” (p.1015). In short,
pronunciation can be described as a way of speaking a word, especially a way that
is accepted or generally understood.
Most of the literature on pronunciation deals with what and how to teach
while the learner remains a silent abstract in the classroom. Morley (1994)
underlined that the prevalent focus on pronunciation teaching nowadays should be
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on designing new wave instructional programs. Moreover, she stressed that these
instructional designs should take into account not only language forms and
functions, but also issues of learner self-involvement and learner strategy training.
In other words, students who have developed the skills to monitor and modify their
speech patterns if necessary should become active partners in their own learning.
It is a common knowledge that there have been different views on teaching
pronunciation in the field of language teaching. The role of pronunciation has varied
widely from having no role in the Grammar-translation method to being the central
focus in the Direct and Audio-lingual method where the emphasis is on the
traditional notions of pronunciation, minimal pairs, drills and short conversations.
The appearance of the communicative approach has placed higher demands for
correct pronunciation. Nevertheless, the teaching of pronunciation is not as simple
as people may think. Lee (2011) asserted:
Pronunciation is a crucial part of learning English as a Second Language, yet it is
one of the most challenging aspects of English for students and teachers. For
students, unfamiliar sounds and combinations of sounds can be difficult to learn.

training on learners’ achievement in communicative competence. According to
Pennington (1996), the most important part of learning a second language rests on
pronunciation. Morley (1998) also stated that pronunciation plays an important role
in overall communicative competence. While, Kelly (2006) confirmed:
A learner who consistently mispronounces a range of phonemes can be extremely
difficult for a speaker from another language community to understand. This can be
very frustrating for the learner who may have a good command of grammar and
lexis but have difficulty in understanding and being understood by a native speaker.
The inaccurate use of suprasegmental elements, such as stress or intonation can
also cause problems… . (p.11)
In addition, Fraser (2000a) explained that being able to speak English
includes a number of sub-skills, of which pronunciation is by far the most important
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(other sub-skills of speaking include vocabulary, grammar, and pragmatics). She
argued that a speaker with good pronunciation is intelligible despite other errors;
with poor pronunciation, a speaker can be very difficult to understand, despite
accuracy in other areas.
Hewings (2004) also emphasized that “difficulties with pronunciation might
mean that students fail to get their message across, even when the correct words are
being used, or they might fail to understand what is said to them.” (p.10)
Yong (2004) confirmed that from the traditional ways of learning English,
students neglected the basic knowledge of speaking. This may have been enough to
meet the demands of English in the years when we had less communication with
foreign countries. However, oral communication began to be more important when
they arrived in this century with extended forms of communication with Western
countries. He asserted that understanding by reading or writing would no longer be
sufficient for the development of the economy and that communicating face to face
personally or through the Internet needed to be understood. Yong also indicated that
pronunciation is the foundation of speaking. English, both written and spoken, has

the correct stressing but also “de-stressing”, and consequently the reduction of
vowel duration and quality play a major role in the production and perception of
words and their meaning. Therefore, improving students’ ability of using correct
word stress is an important part of teaching speaking.
What’s word stress?
According to Tam & Quang (2006), “The syllables of a word which stands
out from the remainder are said to be stressed, to receive stress.” (p.ix).
The production of stress is generally believed to depend on the speaker using
more muscular energy than is used for unstressed syllables. From the perceptual
point of view, all stressed syllables have one characteristic in common, and that is
called prominence; stressed syllables are recognized as stressed because they are
more prominent than unstressed syllables (Tam & Quang, 2006, p.ix).
Tam & Quang (2006) also pointed out that prominence is produced by four
factors: loudness, length, pitch and quality.
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Sentence level stress is described by the term intonation. In this case, not
syllables but whole words are emphasized to maintain a natural rhythm. This
research does not aim to deal with sentence stress.
Levels of word stress
According to Roach (2000) there are three levels of stress which are
distinguished, namely: primary (tonic or nuclear), secondary and unstressed. The
prominence that results from the pitch movement gives the strongest type of stress;
we called the tonic strong stress when we wish to refer specifically to this type of
stress. It is also called primary stress. The syllable that is also quite prominent, but it
is not as strongly stressed as the primary stress is called secondary stress (or non-
tonic stress). The syllable that is called unstressed and regarded as being absence of
any recognizable amount of prominence is unstressed syllable (p.95-96).
Placement of stress within the word
Roach (2000) presented a summary of stress placement in nouns, verbs and

teaching EFL, Meskill (2005) also reported that children who otherwise “removed”
themselves from school community by keeping their heads down on their desks,
crying, acting out, and behaving in ways that revealed strong disconnections with
school, became more active when the screen is turned on. She then concluded that
using computers in teaching language for children brought many a benefit,
especially the children of low motivation.
Abrams (2006) asserted that Computer- Mediated Communication (CMC) is
the process of using computer to facilitate authentic communication between two or
more people, and using CMC in language teaching and learning seems the main
trend in the process of applying IT in English FL education. While Neri & Mich
(2008) showed that young learners improve their word-level pronunciation skills in
English as a foreign language with computers at a level comparable to that achieved
through traditional teacher-led training.
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Cummins & Davesne (2009) also studied on the use of technology for
assessment of EFL abilities and obtained the better results in comparison with other
means of teaching EFL. Jarvis (2006) stated that technological development has
gone with teaching English and it has brought chances to people in communicating,
working, doing business, relaxing or studying and non-native English speakers
mainly come from Asian regions are at the top of using it.
Regarding of the Internet and websites, Kung & Chuo (2002) affirmed that
“students consider the Internet a useful tool to supplement in-class instruction. The
students deemed it appropriate to learn English through teacher-recommended ESL
websites. However, students needed instruction regarding where the sites are and in
how to use them.” Paulsen (2000), as cited in Kung & Chuo (2002) also remarked
about the importance of guiding students in the use of Internet resources. Whereas,
Norman (2011) appreciated the roles of websites:
Multiple online resources exist to help English-language learners improve their
pronunciation for free. Without hiring a tutor or attending English classes, you can

instruction
There are certainly lots of advantages of using websites for pronunciation
instruction. First of all, students have chance to access to authentic voice since there
are video and audio clips by native speakers. Secondly, teachers can save time and
energy; all what they need to do is some guidance for students to study on their own
and some observation to make sure if they are on the right track. In addition,
websites are very useful resources for students to practice pronunciation at home
where there is no teacher’s help. What’s more, websites motivate and relax students
when studying because there are lots of illustrations, clips, games and quizzes to
refresh their mind while studying. Last but not the least; students can test their own
pronunciation with recording function, tests and quizzes.
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Everything has its two sides and websites are not the exception. Once using
websites for language instruction, teachers need to be well-prepared for everything,
for example, the power, the Internet connection and the access speed, the
headphones, projector, sound server installation, searching engines etc. All these
conditions must work well during the lesson because if one thing goes wrong, the
lesson will not be successfully carried out. Besides, teachers also have to pay very
close attention to make sure that students do not access to other websites and check
whether they actually imitate the sounds in the video or audio clips.
1.6. Websites evaluation
Nowadays there are thousands of websites for English teaching and learning
on the Internet. Therefore, it is essential for teachers as well as learners to decide
what is good and what is a waste of time. The excessively increasing load of
information production and routing within the Internet leads to an inevitable
overload of useless information, which raises certain criticisms concerning the
pedagogic value and relevance of the web. According to Luhmann (1996), as cited
in Sofos & Kostas (2009), the amassing of information follows a non-systematic
pattern because the organization and presentation of information on the Web is

criteria. The first selected website is: 18

This website, which is mainly designed for English learning, is ideal for
guiding students to pronounce correct vowels and consonants in English since there
are series of video clips directing students how to pronounce properly. Besides, it
also consists of quizzes, and other activities for students to practise and test their
own pronunciation. It is written and designed by the BBC (The British Broadcasting
Cooperation) which has gained reputation throughout the world over years. The
working team are experienced native teachers, editors, producers and programmers,
who have been working for BBC for many years and very professional in designing
a very interesting and user-friendly website with easy navigation. In addition, this
website is frequently updated and in terms of functionality, it works well with no
broken links. The page is incorporated with Video Media, PDF, audio and some
links with other websites like: Youtube, Google, Encyclopedia and Wiki. Another
advantage of the website is that this is a free website on a consistent basis and quick
accessibility.
The second website is:
This website is especially ideal for the students to practice minimal pairs. It
is mainly created for learning English pronunciation and promoting English
19

speaking. This is a copyright website which is written and designed by Tim Bowyer
who has taught English, authored courses, trained teachers and directed schools in
England, France, Spain, Italy, Iran, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, Jordan, the