VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES
----------

ĐÀO THỊ KIM NHUNG

AN APPLICATION OF GAMES AND OTHER STIMULATING
ACTIVITIES IN TEACHING PRONUNCIATION TO GRADE
10 ENGLISH GIFTED STUDENTS AT HA NOI SPECIALISED
UPPER SECONDARY SCHOOL

(ÁP DỤNG TRÒ CHƠI VÀ CÁC HOẠT ĐỘNG MANG TÍNH KHÍCH LỆ
KHÁC TRONG VIỆC DẠY PHÁT ÂM CHO HỌC SINH CHUYÊN ANH
LỚP 10 TRƯỜNG PHỔ THÔNG CHUYÊN NGỮ HÀ NỘI )

Course: Cohort 12
Supervisor: Dr. GARY CARKIN

Ha Noi 2013
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………….4

1


1. Rationale………………………………………………………………………….4
2. Objectives of the study……………………………………………………………5
3. Scope of the study………………………………………………………………...5
4. Methods of the study……………………………………………………………...5
5. Design of the study……………………………………………………………….5
DEVELOPMENT………………………………………………………………………….6

REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………27

2


APPENDICES ………………………………………………………………........28

3


INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale

It is undeniable that English has become a language of global
communication thanks to its contribution to different fields of our life such as:
science, technology, aviation, diplomacy and so on. No one can deny that the
rapid expansion of information technologies and the spread of globalization
have led to an explosion in the demand for English worldwide.
English is now taught throughout of Vietnam in different levels of
education from primary schools to universities because it serves as an
international language and as a mean to promote mutual understanding and
cooperation between Vietnam and other countries. In fact, more and more
people desire to know and master English in order to keep them up-to-date with
the global development. As a result, English is taught not only at schools and
universities but also at many foreign language centres, on radio, television and
even via the internet. However, both teaching and learning of English are still
far from being satisfaction. One main problem is that most Vietnamese learners
are rather good at English writtenly but not orally. Many of them have a good
command of grammar and vocabulary, which promises very high marks in
written tests, but cannot communicate successfully with foreigners. The reason


To create motivation for students in pronunciation classes, teachers at
English group, CNN, have applied a lot of games and activities. However, the
researcher in this study only focuses on and analyzes some typical ones (which
will be presented in the following parts) and then suggests some effective
activities that teachers can introduce to students so that they have more practice
outside class. There are 4classes at grade 10 which consist of 160 students who
have to take pronunciation as a compulsory subject; however, this action
research was carried out in only two classes of which the researcher was in
charge. Thus, the questionnaire was delivered to only 50 participants.
4. Methods of the study

Action research is the method employed in this study. To achieve the aims
mentioned above, the researcher has used a number of instruments to collect
data for analysis which include a questionnaire distributed before the term
started and after it ended, teachers’ observation and notes.
5. Design of the study

This minor thesis is composed of three parts.
Part 1, INTRODUCTION, presents the rationale, aims, scope, methods and
design of the study.
5


Part 2, DEVELOPMENT, is divided into three chapters.
Chapter 1, Literature Review, presents relevant concepts to pronunciation
and pronunciation teaching.
Chapter 2, Methodology, involves the information about context,
participants and instruments of the study.
Chapter 3: Data Presentation, Analysis and Discussion, focuses on data

aspects of language. We may be proficient at grammar and have a huge store of
vocabulary, but if we pronounce words wrongly, we just will not get understood.
Wong (1993) argues that the importance of pronunciation is even more distinct
when the connection between pronunciation and listening comprehension is
considered. As listeners expect spoken English to follow certain patterns of
rhythm and intonation, speakers need to employ these patterns to communicate
effectively. If the rhythm and intonation are different, listeners simply can’t get
the meaning. Similarly, listeners need to know how speech is organized and
what patterns of intonation mean in order to interpret speech accurately. Thus,
learning about pronunciation develops learners’ abilities to comprehend spoken
7


English. Furthermore, Wong demonstrated that a lack of knowledge of
pronunciation could even affect students’ reading and spelling.
2. Pronunciation in language teaching

2.1. The status of pronunciation in current language teaching
The status of pronunciation teaching in different schools of language
teaching has varied widely. According to Castillo (1990), pronunciation
teaching has no role at all in the grammar-translation method, but it is the main
focus in the audio-lingual method. The audio-lingual view of the pronunciation
class was also mirrored in situational language teaching, developed in Britain
(Richards and Rodgers, 1986
Nowadays, teachers and learners have realized the importance of
pronunciation in English teaching and learning, however, it still has not received
enough attention. In fact, pronunciation tends to be de-emphasized in most
English courses because many teachers believe that pronunciation cannot be
taught effectively and it is not worth spending time on this field because it
should be allowed to develop naturally by students.

distinguish the word from others. Therefore, listeners often find it hard to
understand what the speaker is saying when he or she misuses word stress.
2.1.3. Rhythm

Rhythm is the obvious feature of every language. Rhythm or beat of a
language is the product of word stress and the way in which important items are
emphasized. The combination of strong beats (the occurrence of important
items) and weak beats (the occurrence of unimportant items) makes rhythm easy
to be recognized. Thus, after dealing with word stress patterns, teachers of
pronunciation should introduce to their students the rhythm of English which is
characterized by the alteration of strong and weak syllables (Kenworthy, 1987).
Intonation
3. Current ideas on pronunciation teaching and learning
Changing outlooks on language learning and teaching have influenced the
view of language competence, which leads to a shift from specific linguistic
competencies to broader communicative competencies as goals for teachers and
students (Morley, 1991). Previously, teachers of pronunciation only focused on
teaching segmental features which started with a concentration on phonetic
alphabets during the Reform Movement (Celce-Murcia et. al., 1996). Phonetic
training was used in order to help learners establish good speech habits. Minimal
pair drills were used extensively to distinguish phonemes in listening practice
and oral production (Celce-Murcia et. al., 1996). McNerney and Mendelsohn
(1992, p. 186) suggested “a short-term pronunciation course should focus first
and foremost on suprasegmentals, as they have the greatest impact on the
9


comprehensibility of learners’ English”. So far a lot of books for teachers have
largely encouraged the teaching of suprasegments at the production level to
improve learners’ intelligibility.


6. The use of games and other communicative activities in pronunciation teaching

As discussed above, pronunciation is an essential part in language learning
and teaching. Many people believe that in language learning, effort is required at
every moment and must be maintained over a long period of time. It is also
obviously true with pronunciation learning. There are a few pronunciation
teachers who think that teaching pronunciation means helping students perceive
and produce English sounds correctly. That is why they often ask their students
to repeat the sounds times and times again after introducing them, which makes
students get bored with studying pronunciation. Once students get bored, they
will get nothing from the studying.
Talking about the advantages of games, Thiagarajan (1999); Wright,
Betteridge, & Buckby (2005) claimed that games add interest to what students
might not find very interesting. Sustaining interest means sustaining effort. After
all, learning a language involves long-term effort because games offer students a
fun-filled and relaxing learning atmosphere. Thanks to that, they learn and
practise the sounds in a non-stressful way. Games ease the fear of negative
evaluation, the concern of being negatively judged in public, and which is one of
the main factors inhibiting language learners from using the target language in
front of other people (Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope, 1986). In a game-oriented
context, anxiety is reduced and speech fluency is generated, so communicative
competence is achieved.
According to Shalley Vernon in the article “Teaching English
Pronunciation Using Role Playing and Other Games”, anxiety is one of the most
common obstacles to the ESL students’ ability to learn English pronunciation.
However, the problem of anxiety can also be resolved with games because
students will learn to relax and enjoy themselves, which encourages them to
participate and be more willing to experiment with new different sounds.
Richard-Amato (1988) and Uberman (1998) also shared the same view that the


METHODOLOGY
1. Context of the study
The study was carried out in two grade 10 classes at CNN.They have a
favorable English learning environment because they can work with qualified
teachers, have more access to resources of reference books in the library or via
the internet, and more chance to meet foreigners. Thus, a good way to enhance
students’ improvement is to motivate them to make most use of all the external
conditions to self study.
2. Games
Most of the games applied in my classes are taken from the book
“Pronunciation Games” by Mark Hancock. I have chosen some games that were
suitable for my students when they practised individual sounds, word stress,
sentence stress and intonation (Appendix 3). All the games were used in classes
at different stages of the lesson.
Besides, I have also designed some other games that drew much attention
and interest from my students.
Teacher vs. Class
- Material: One set of cards, on each card, there is one word which is
familiar but commonly mispronounced; make cards out of the game words
(Appendix 4)
- Rules: Teacher (T) raises one card for each student to pronounce. If that
student says it correctly, the whole class has 1 point. Otherwise, the T has 1
point. Every student in the class will take turns to do this until the end to see
who wins the game.
- Notes: T is expected to win but don’t forget to encourage students (Ss). At
the end of the game, T should stress that the ultimate purpose of the game is to
show Ss the difficulty of pronunciation
Single Sounds
- Material: 6 sets of cards, each set has 44 cards. On each card, there is one

because it was an effective tool to measure my students’ improvement. The
result of the final examination worked as a good reference to see how much they
had gained after the course. Besides the two tests, I used questionnaire because
it was easy to manage and obtain big-scale data. Questionnaires are familiar to
most people and nearly everyone has had some experience completing
questionnaires, so they generally do not make people apprehensive. Moreover,
questionnaires reduce bias. There is uniform question presentation and no
middle-man bias. The researcher's own opinions will not influence the
14


respondent to answer questions in a certain manner. Thus, the questionnaire
would give me more reliable data for analysis. Lastly, I applied classroom
observation and teacher’s notes because it was convenient for the teacher to
obtain more detailed and precise evidence of the students’ attitude and
classroom atmosphere. Additionally, it would permit the researcher to study the
processes of education in naturalistic settings. Classroom observation also
stimulated change and verified that the change occurred, which led to improved
understanding and better models for improving teaching.
4. Questionnaire
The questionnaire was delivered to students before and after the course.
The purpose of the two deliveries was to find out the students’ attitude, interest
and motivation before the course and the changes in the students’ self evaluation
after the course. (Appendix 1)
5. Teacher’s notes
The researcher carried out classroom observation in order to take notes of
changes in the students’ attitude, motivation, interest and improvement during
the course. The researcher also reflected on the teaching and learning process
after each lesson.(Appendix 2)


As can be seen clearly from the chart, the majority of students thought
that pronunciation was very important in learning a foreign language both before
and after the course. However, the percentage of students who held the idea after
the course (84%) was much higher than that of those who had the same point of
view before the course (60%). On the contrary, only half of the students who
thought that pronunciation is rather important kept their view after they had
finished all pronunciation lessons. It was obvious that none of the students did
not appreciate the role of pronunciation and chose option d (not important at all).
16


In order to analyse students’ evaluation of the importance of pronunciation, the
researcher based not only on their direct answer to question 1 but also on their
acknowledgement on the influence of poor pronunciation on other skills in
question 2.

Chart 2: The influence of pronunciation on speaking and listening
Generally speaking, most of the students were aware of the role and
influence of pronunciation, which is illustrated by the fact that 80% of them
found it difficult to learn such skills as speaking and listening due to their poor
pronunciation. After the course, even more students (88%) realized the reason
for difficulty in listening and speaking was poor pronunciation.
Looking at the analysis, it was obvious that students were positive in
learning pronunciation. They had quite high awareness of the importance of
pronunciation in their language learning, especially speaking and listening.
• Students’ evaluation of their aptitude to learn pronunciation
There are three questions dealing with this matter. The first question is for
students to self evaluate their pronunciation. The responses before and after the
course were different in all options.


to vowel sounds, the first problem was that most students could not correctly
pronounce the sound /æ/. This might be because the sound does not exist in
Vietnamese language. They replaced the sound with either /e/ or /a/ which
seems to be more familiar to them. Another typical problem was the length of
sounds. Most students could not distinguish short and long vowel sounds such as
/ι/ or /I:/, /Υ/ or /u:/, etc. For diphthongs, they did not pronounce them with
enough length of time and did not pronounce them as two vowel sounds but just
like one sound in Vietnamese. For instant, /ei/ was pronounced like “ây”, /≅Υ/
was pronounced like “âu”.
In comparison with vowel sounds, students had more troubles in
pronouncing consonant sounds. Deleting ending sounds was a common mistake
of most students. This kind of mistakes is easy to be explained because in
Vietnamese language system, consonants at the end of a word are never spoken.
The second striking note was that students often replaced some English sounds
with Vietnamese ones. Such typical sounds were /Τ/, /∆/, /Σ/, /Ζ/, /r/, /j/
/tr/, /dΖ/. /Τ/ was often replaced with “th” in Vietnamese, /∆/, /j/, /Ζ/, /dΖ/ were
mispronounced to /z/ or “d” in Vietnamese. /r/ was also pronounced like /z/
sometimes. /Σ/ was wrongly pronounced like /s/, /tr/ was not pronounced as a
consonant clusters but like the Vietnamese “tr” which sounds like /tΣ/.
Additionally, some students even could not distinguish /n/ and /l/ due to their
dialect. Consonant clusters were another problem for my students. Some of them
could not make the clusters smooth because they tend to add /≅/ between the two
sounds. Finally, many students added /s/ to almost every word they pronounced.
Word stress
Many students did not put any stress on multi-syllable words. They
pronounced every syllable with the same effort, which slowed down their speed
and made their speaking hard to listen to. A few students seemed to be
conscious of the necessity to put stress on multi-syllable words; however, they
do not stress on correct syllables. This problem led to the fact that multi-syllable
words they pronounced sounded strange and difficult to be recognized.

most attentive and motivated in practising pronunciation with songs and puppetplay. Students also took part in such activity as news reading, but they did not
show their great enthusiasm as in other activities. The researcher also noted the
fact that some students were considerably more shy and self-conscious than
others and were not confident to take part in class activities for fear that they
20


would make mistakes and be laughed at by their classmates. Nonetheless, some
were so dominant and always volunteered to participate in games and other
activities. Another thing that the researcher realized was that while participating
in pronunciation games, the students expressed disappointment when they were
not the winners in the competition, but after that they quickly recovered and
tried much more in other games.
• With regards to students’ performance, the researcher would like to
discuss their performance during class time and in the final examination. In the
beginning lessons, many students demonstrated difficulty in articulating some
vowel and consonant sounds listed in the analysis of the diagnostic test. They
also had many problems with word stress and intonation. However, the
problems reduced gradually in the following lessons. Some students showed
their great improvement, but some others still could not overcome their
difficulties even at the end of the course. Among those who did not gain any
improvement, some worked very hard in class, but some did not. Most of the
students completed homework very regularly and often show better performance
in presenting their homework than in activities they joined in class. At the end of
the course, most of the students were more aware of the difference between long
and short vowel sounds and more careful in pronouncing words including those
sounds. Nevertheless, many of them still could not pronounce the vowel
sound /æ/. Additionally, diphthongs were not pronounced long enough. Such
sounds as /Τ/, /∆/, /Σ/, /Ζ/, /dΖ/, /n/, /l/ were also difficult for many students
even when they performed in activities in the last lesson. As for word-stress,

in their learning. When applying such interesting activities, the teacher hardly
found any sleepy and bored faces in her class, instead, there were just eagerness
and enthusiasm. Students often volunteered to take part in motivating activities
that their teacher introduced in class. Sometimes they showed exhaustion and
tiredness in pronunciation lessons because they had had two hours studying
listening, however, students never showed their disconcern and disinterest. The
researcher many times saw students practising sounds, word-stress and sentence
stress in the break time. They even told the teacher that they spent more time
self-studying pronunciation than they had used to. Many of them revised the
sounds by replaying the games in class, listen to songs and try to sing the lyrics,
watch movies or animated films and read the subtitles aloud. Some other
students logged in different websites for pronunciation that the teacher had
introduced to them to have more drillings. They used the internet not only for
chatting, emailing, searching for information but also for practising
pronunciation. At the end of the course, when the teacher collected the students’
22


feedback, the majority of them revealed that pronunciation class was what they
expected the most among all subjects in the week. Thanks to such interest,
students’ intelligibility had been improved much at the end of the course even
though both teacher and students had longed for better results.
Some disadvantages of the use of games and other stimulating activities
It is obvious that apart from advantages games and other stimulating
activities have brought about, there have been some disadvantages that led to
difficulties teachers have to overcome in order to prepare and organize class
activities which are effective and attractive to students.
Vast time and effort investment is the first thing that teachers have to face
with. It is undeniable that teachers need to spend a lot of time reading different
books and reference documents to have a wide range of activities that they can

Last but not least, teachers will need very good classroom management
skills so as not to make the class chaotic when students take part in games and
other stimulating activities. It is clear that students will not sit still in some
activities, they have to move their places and undoubtedly, there will be a lot of
noise. If teachers cannot control the class, students may not learn anything but
just chat to each other or are tired from hearing so much noise. It is also very
easy for students to be over excited in some games and activities, many of them
may keep talking about the games even when they are over. Thus, teachers are
the ones to drive them back to the lesson and make them be on track.
It is true that in order to prepare and organize interesting activities for
students, it takes teachers quite a lot of time and effort, but the reward of the
improvement and favor of the students makes it worth trying.

24


CONCLUSION
1. Summary of major findings
First of all, the course has helped to improve students’ motivation and
interest in learning pronunciation. The activities, in fact, have brought about a
lot of joyous and happy time to students when they were in class or even outside
class. With those activities, pronunciation drills were not a burden to students
any more. In contrast, students were willing to practice sounds, stress and
intonation during the course.
Secondly, the course actually had positive effects on students’ intelligibility
in pronunciation. The results in the final examination clearly showed their
improvement. Most of them had better pronunciation of letter sounds. Moreover,
apart from being aware of the role of stress, rhythm and intonation, almost all
students paid more attention to those aspects and were more careful when they
were speaking. Thus, they were undoubtedly better at segmental and