MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
VINH UNIVERSITY
VO THI HUONG LY

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE 11
th
GRADERS'
DIFFICULTIES IN LEARNING ENGLISH
PRONUNCIATION AT THANH CHUONG 3
HIGH SCHOOL
MASTER’S THESIS IN EDUCATION
NGHE AN - 2014
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
VINH UNIVERSITY
VO THI HUONG LY
AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE 11
th
GRADERS'
DIFFICULTIES IN LEARNING ENGLISH
PRONUNCIATION AT THANH CHUONG 3
HIGH SCHOOL
Field: Theory and Methodology of English Language Teaching
Code: 60.14.01.11
MASTER’S THESIS IN EDUCATION
Supervisor: NGUYEN GIA VIET Ph.D
NGHE AN - 2014
STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP
I hereby acknowledge that this study is mine. The data and findings
discussed in the thesis are true, used with permission, and have not been
published elsewhere.
Author

LIST OF TABLES vi
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION 1
1.1. Rationale 1
1.2. Purpose of the Study 2
1.3. Scope of the Study 3
1.4. The research questions 3
1.5. Research methodology 3
1.6. Setting and background 4
1.7. Outline of the Study 5
CHAPTER 2
THEORICAL BACKGROUND 7
2.1. Role of pronunciation in communicative competence and in foreign language
learning 7
2.2. Approaches to pronunciation teaching –pronunciation teaching Methodologies 8
2.3. Factors affecting pronunciation learning 10
2.3.1. The native language 10
2.3.2. The age 11
2.3.3. Phonetic ability 12
2.3.4. Attitudes and identity 12
2.3.5. Motivation and concern for good pronunciation 12
2.4. Differences in the sound systems between English and Vietnamese 13
2.4.1. Phonemes 13
2.4.2. Vowels 13
2.4.3. Consonants 13
2.4.4. Stress 14
2.4.5. Intonation 15
2.4.6. Linking sounds 15
2.5. Common English pronunciation problems encountered by Vietnamese learners 18
2.5.1. Vowel problems 18

5.3.2. Limitations of the study 67
5.3.3. Suggestions for further studies 68
REFERENCES 69
APPENDIX 72
v
LIST OF TABLES
Pages
Table 4.1. Students’ general attitude towards learning English 32
Table 4.2. Students’ awareness of the importance of learning English pronunciation 35
Table 4.3. Students’evaluationon difficulties in learning English pronunciation 37
Table 4.4. Students’ awareness of the concepts of stress, intonation
and rhythm 39
Table 4.5. Students evaluation on difficulties in learning English intonation 41
vi
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

1.1. Rationale
English has become a language for global communication these days. In
this common trend, English in Vietnam has become one of the important,
compulsory subjects at schools, from primary school to high school system.
No longer are students merely required to master English grammar and
vocabulary to sit for a test, they are now studying English to develop their
own communicative skills, of which intelligible pronunciation plays a crucial
part. With poor pronunciation, students have problems either making themselves
understood or understanding others. Therefore, there should be the appropriate
attention to teaching and learning pronunciation.
Despite realizing the importance of English pronunciation, Vietnamese
students still can not acquire correctly. The main reason is that the traditional
teaching laid the emphasis on grammar. Many students can not pronounce

th
grade at Thanh Chuong 3 high school entitled: “An investigation
into the 11
th
graders’difficulties in learning English pronunciation at Chuong 3
high school”.
The research findings would be followed by suggestions for students
with the hope that the students at my school could improve their English
pronunciation.
1.2. Purpose of the Study
The main aims:
-To investigate the difficulties that Thanh Chuong 3 high school students
meet when they learn English pronunciation.
2
-To recommend some suggestions for teachers and learners to overcome
these difficulties.
To achieve these aims, some main objectives were defined as the followings:
- To find out students’ attitudes towards learning English in general and
learning English pronunciation in particular.
- To investigate how difficult the English pronunciation is for the students.
- To find out what causes the difficulties.
- To offer some recommendations.
1.3. Scope of the Study
The study was just conducted on a focused group of one hundred of grade
11
th
students in Thanh Chuong 3 high school. This study was aimed at exploring
Thanh Chuong 3 high school students’ difficulties in learning English pronunciation
and giving some suggested recommendations.
1.4. The research questions

1.6. Setting and background
Located in a remote area in Thanh Chuong district, Nghe An province,
Thanh Chuong 3 high school has a lot of weaknesses and difficulties. Most of
the teachers are very young and lack of teaching experience. Furthermore, the
students there mostly come from poor families. They do not have good
conditions to study. Because of these above reasons, Thanh Chuong 3 high
school is somewhat weaker than other schools. And as a certain, English is
really limited. Although English has been compulsory for many years,
students have not paid much attention to it. If some students at this school
invest time to study the subject, it is just because of the exams they have to
4
take. Some of students fail the national examination for the Secondary School
Diploma because they can not do English tests well. Due to this, students
there tend to concentrate on English subject more and more. However,
because of many factors, especially the objectives of the test, English teaching
and learning in this area focus much on grammar, not other skills. Teachers
there tend to ignore teaching pronunciation to the students. That is why
pronunciation seems to be very difficult for most of the students. Moreover,
large class size and poorly-equipped classrooms make speaking lessons more
difficult. Because of these, students at Thanh Chuong 3 High School are weak
at speaking English, and they often have wrong pronunciation. Traditionally,
teachers did not pay much attention to teaching pronunciation. And the old
English textbooks did not involve teaching pronunciation, either. When we
teach our students with the new textbooks, most of them are unwilling to have
pronunciation lessons in Language Focus part, because they find it hard to
achieve as good and correct pronunciation as in the CD. For the teachers and
students at this school, pronunciation is a great problem.
1.7. Outline of the Study
This thesis is presented in five chapters.
The first chapter, Introduction, provides a brief overview of the study

take a few examples: if some one pronounces the words fog and fox, sea and
she, sick and six with relatively no differences, in some cases can lead to
misunderstanding. Another example when one pronounces the word present
with stress in the first syllable, whereas she uses in the sentence " I'd like to
present" is certainly incorrect and irritating. So it has been obvious why
pronunciation is important. In addition, good pronunciation can also give a
plus value to those who master it.
Pronunciation is as important as any other aspects of language like
syntax or vocabulary. Correct pronunciation is very necessary to develop our
speaking skill. Pronunciation also has many other connections to the other
fields such as listening, spelling and even grammar. For example, if someone
is good at pronunciation, he will be able to comprehend the spoken English
more easily. Or if a person understands and uses the rhythm, intonation and
stress correctly, he will make the listeners understand better. Even pronunciation
has connection to grammar, especially in English. The speaker who
pronounces correctly the endings of the words, for example,can give grammatical
information.
7
In short, pronunciation has important values not only in oral communication
but also in foreign language learning. Acquiring good pronunciation is what a
learner needs to make effort to do on the way of mastering a foreign language.
2.2. Approaches to pronunciation teaching –pronunciation teaching
Methodologies
The two general approaches to pronunciation teaching described in
Celce-Murcia et al. (1996) have been adopted by many researchers, which are
intuitive-imitative approach and analytical-linguistic approach.
An intuitive-imitative approach assumes that students can develop acceptable
pronunciation and speaking skills when exposed to the target language through
accurate models. This approach relies heavily upon imitation and repetition,
without any explicit information provided by teachers.

of elements of suprasegmentals (Pennington, & Richards, 1986). Techniques
used to teach pronunciation included listening and imitating, phonetic
training, minimal pairs drilling in context, visual aids, reading aloud,
recording the students‟ production with more focus on suprasegmental
aspects of pronunciation. It can be seen that communicative approach seems
to be more balanced approach with the focus on both accuracy and fluency.
The approach had characteristics of both intuitive-imitative approach and
analytical-linguistic approach.
In the light of communicative language teaching (CLT), learners are
expected to achieve “intelligible pronunciation” of the target language, which
is, according to Kenworthy, (1987), understood by a listener at a given time in
a given situation. That is, students are able to understand, accept and declare
to be recognized meaningfully in their oral communication.
To sum up, trends of teaching pronunciation have been changing a lot
9
during different periods. Nowadays, teaching pronunciation plays a very
important part in the language teaching. It is the main target connected with
other skills to get the highest purpose of learning a foreign language, which is
communication.
2.3. Factors affecting pronunciation learning
There are many factors affecting the learners' pronunciation. According
to Kenworthy (1987:4-9), factors such as the native language, the age, amount
of exposure, phonetic ability, attitude and identity, motivation and concern for
good pronunciation have great influence on pronunciation learning.
2.3.1. The native language
The native language plays an important role in learning to pronounce
English as it is clearly seen that a foreign accent is influenced by some of the
sound characteristics of the learner's native language. Due to the role of native
language, there has been a great deal of research on the differences between
sound systems of English and other languages in terms of sound system as

role of the native language is very important to the second language
pronunciation learning because the native language not only affects the ability
to produce English sounds but also the ability to hear English sounds.
It is proved that the more differences between the two languages there
are, the more difficulty the students have to cope with pronunciation
2.3.2. The age
It is commonly assumed that people can pronounce a foreign language
like a native if they start learning it as a child. This leads to a question that
whether there is an age-related limit on the mastery of pronunciation. We can
see that adult second language learners often have a foreign accent while child
second language learners often attain native-like pronunciation. As many
11
experienced teachers of foreign languages know, most of adult learners have
difficulties in acquiring native-like pronunciation However, it does not mean
that no adult can achieve native-like pronunciation. In fact, some adults do
very well in learning pronunciation and among other adult learners, the degree
of pronunciation accuracy varies considerably from one to another. Therefore,
the critical period hypothesis do not absolve English Second Language teachers of
the responsibility of teaching pronunciation.
Another factor is the amount of exposure to English the learner receives.
However, it does not totally mean learners who have more opportunities
speaking and listening with the native English speakers can have better
English pronunciation. Based on some recent studies, it seems that amount of
exposure is not a necessary factor but a contributory factor for the
development of pronunciation skills.
2.3.3. Phonetic ability
Researchers demonstrate that some people are able to mimic sounds
more accurately than others. These abilities are innate, so this factor seems to
be out of the teacher's control. What the teacher can do is to investigate the
abilities of the learners and provide a variety of tasks so that something will

pronunciation.
2.4.2. Vowels
Three out of seven short English vowels are absent in Vietnamese.
Vietnamese does not have vowel contrasts (minimal pairs) which means there
is not discrimination between the short and long. This is really a matter to
Vietnamese students because they cannot pronounce some words correctly
without looking at its pronunciation transcription in the dictionary.
2.4.3. Consonants
13
English has 24 consonants but there are only 22 in Vietnamese. There are
some phonemes in English but not in Vietnamese and vice versa. In
Vietnamese, a letter is often represented by the same phoneme. In English,
some phonemes seem to be represented by identical letters but different
pronunciation. Vietnamese in general is spoken with a staccato delivery. Syllables
and words are not linked together as in English but are clearly separated from each
other. Especially final consonant clusters cause the greatest difficulties for
Vietnamese students.
2.4.4. Stress
Vietnamese is a basically monosyllabic language. Unlike English - a
polysyllabic language, most Vietnamese words have only one syllable. And
unstressed syllable do not occur in Vietnamese. Even in compound nouns,
each syllable has its own distinctive tone. This is the reason why stress within
words does not exist in Vietnamese. Moreover, English stress placements can be
changed by the addition of the prefixes and suffixes or with different vocabulary
items.
For example:
• -ee (employ→ employee)
• -ique (tech → technique)
• -aire (question → questionnaire)
• -eous (advantage → advantageous)

Vietnamese words are spoken with weakened breath out flow at the final
boundary with distinct separation between words. Because of this difference,
Vietnamese students often make mistakes when they speak English. They
usually speak English words and syllables separately. It is very difficult for
them to understand native English speakers because of the link between the
last consonant of the words to the following word which begins with a vowel
Below are some examples of linking words:
15
1-Linking consonant to vowel (CTV)
Example 1
1st Word Consonant To Vowel 2nd Word
Wake /k/
/∧/
up
Explanation:
Say [way cup] and you will be saying [wake up]
Example 2
1st Word Consonant To Vowel 2nd Word
Stop /p/ /i:/ eating
Explanation:
Say [sto peating] and you will be saying [stop eating]
2-Linking consonant to consonant (CTC)
If CTV is the most common word linking pattern in spoken English,
CTC is the most difficult to apply as it involves loads of details and presents a
number of exceptions.
Example 1
1st Word Consonant To Same Consonant 2nd Word
stop /p/ /p/ playing
Explanation:
Say 1 longer /p/(by longer I mean keep your lips closed for a little longer