CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
1.1 Rationale
The trend of globalization in every field all over the world has given foreign languages in
general and English in particular a greater role than ever before. As English is largely used
in international settings, the ability to communicate in real-life situations is very important.
Therefore, speaking plays an essential role because without it, communication cannot take
place directly between people.
Dealing with how to improve speaking skills, learners face the problem of pronunciation. A
consideration number of learners’ pronunciation errors and how they inhibit successful
communication is a good reason for the justification of why it is important to teach
pronunciation to learners.
There is a great number of books relating to the teaching of English pronunciation, most of
which refer to specific exercises to help students achieve better pronunciation. However, in
my experience as a teacher of English for three years, I have witnessed many cases in
which students are able to do pronunciation exercises, but fail to have proper pronunciation
in their real-life speaking. Thus, a good mark in doing pronunciation exercises in written
form does not accompany good pronunciation.
In my opinion, the problem lies in the fact that students do not receive adequate feedback
from the teacher on their pronunciation performance. Some students even do not know how
to form certain sounds in English. Therefore, it is impossible for them to have genuine
production of sounds and sentences. Despite this, little can be done about this due to a vast
number of factors, the most serious of which is the high student-teacher ratio in Vietnamese
universities, which is about 25 to one (at universities in which English is a major). The
teachers hardly have enough time to pay attention and give correction to every student’
speaking performance in general and pronunciation in particular. As a result, students are
unable to identify their weak aspects.
All of these motivated me to conduct an action research on the use of continuous feedback
with the aim at improving the first year students’ English pronunciation.
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1.2 Statement of the problem
As a teacher at the English Department, College of Foreign Languages, Hanoi National

Continuous Feedback to Improve the First Year Students’ English Pronunciation at the
English Department, College of Foreign Languages, Vietnam National University, Hanoi to
be the topic of my thesis.
1.3 Purposes of the study
This research was designed to improve the students’ pronunciation performance by using
continuous feedback. Generally, it has three purposes:
- To find possible explanations for the weak pronunciation competence of the students
- To investigate pronunciation problems among first year students of English at the English
Department, College of Foreign Languages, Vietnam National University, Hanoi .
However, due to the limitation of time, the researcher only focused on English consonant
sounds.
- To justify the effect of continuous feedback on students’ pronunciation.
1.4 Research questions
With the above purposes, the research questions are:
1. What are the possible reasons that lead to students’ weak pronunciation of English?
2. What are the students’ most common problems regarding English consonant sounds?
3. Can continuous feedback improve students’ English pronunciation? If yes, to what
extend?
1.5 Scope of the study
The research was conducted on the first year students at the English Department of CFL,
VNU. Regarding its scope, the research was only aimed at justifying the effect of
continuous feedback on the students’ pronunciation of English consonant sounds. Other
aspects of English pronunciation would not be investigated. Even though the researcher
made use of speaking tests as an important instrument for the research, only issues
concerning the students’ pronunciation of consonant sounds were taken into consideration.
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1.6 Research method
The method employed in this study is an action research, with the use of a number of
instruments, namely observation, questionnaires, speaking tests and interviews.
Action research has proved to be the best choice for this study because the study was aimed

well as presents limitations of the research. It also makes recommendations for further
research in the same field.
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CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Pronunciation teaching and learning
2.1.1 The importance of teaching and learning pronunciation
According to Kelly (2000: 11), it is vital for a language learner to have good pronunciation
of that language. However, pronunciation competence does not go with the mastery of
grammar rules or a good lexis command. Some learners may have already acquired a
considerable amount of grammar and vocabulary, but still fail to communicate effectively
due to their weak pronunciation. A learner who mispronounces a variety of words would
cause great difficulties for a speaker of that language to understand, which is a frustrating
experience. Therefore, it can be concluded that pronunciation plays a vital role in learner’s
speaking ability. Only when a learner is competent in pronunciation can his speaking skills
are acclaimed.
In addition to that, bad pronunciation inevitably has negative effect on the learner’s
listening ability. When a learner has already been accustomed to the wrong way of
pronouncing particular language sounds and utterances, it is unlikely that s/he will be able
to recognize the authentic pronunciation by native speakers. There are many cases in which
learners are asked to listen to a familiar expression by native speakers with the use of
mainly common words. However, they fail to interpret it because they find its
pronunciation totally different from the way they are used to speaking or listening in their
daily communication. As a result, they cannot understand what the speakers mean.
Moreover, it is obvious that good pronunciation serves as a strong motivation for language
learners. Most language learners show considerable enthusiasm for pronunciation as they
consider it a good way to show that they are competent of the language. Once they have
obtained adequate pronunciation competence, they gradually build up strong confidence for
themselves and are ready to learn new things without hesitation.
2.1.2 Approaches and methods in pronunciation teaching
The history and scope of pronunciation teaching are revised in Teaching Pronunciation

In Direct Method, which first became popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the teacher
provides learners with a model for native-like speech. This can either be the teacher himself
or a recording. By listening and then imitating the model excessively, learners gradually
develop their pronunciation. Some successors to this method are called naturalistic
methods, which mean methods that devote a period of learning solely to listening before
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speaking is allowed. Linguists following this method believe that when learners are asked
to listen without having to worry about speaking, they are better at recognizing the sounds
because they are under less pressure. Thus, it is likely that they will be able to produce
correct sounds even without receiving explicit pronunciation instruction.
Other methods, namely Audiolingualism in the US and the Oral Approach in Britain during
the 1940s and 1950s have another way to treat pronunciation. In the class, pronunciation is
very important and is taught explicitly from the start. The teacher (or a recording) models a
sound, or an utterance and students are asked to repeat it. The difference between
Audiolingualism and Direct Method lies in the feature that in Audiolingualism class, beside
the model, the teacher also takes advantage of a number of teaching aids such as phonetic
description, or the transcription system. The most common technique that is used to teach
pronunciation is the minimal pair drills. Learners are asked to distinguish between two
different sounds that might sound similar by listening to the teacher or a tape recorder. This
listening discrimination is followed by oral practice.
During the 1970s, the Silent Way came to public attention. In classes applying this method,
accurate pronunciation is a focus from the very beginning. The teacher speaks as little as
possible, but takes advantage of gestures to indicate what the students should do. S/he can
do this with the aid of a number of tools such as a sound-colour chart, the Fidel charts,
word charts, and colored rods.
Another method that also came into being during the 1970s was the Community Language
Learning (CLL). This is a method which focuses much on the learners rather than the
teacher or teaching curriculum. A tape recorder is an indispensable tool in this class.
Students sit round a table, and then ask the teacher to translate any utterances they wish to
be able to speak in the target language. The teacher then provides students with the phrase

about how sounds are formed. They are also aided by the teacher to make genuine sound
production. However, this kind of technique is not supposed to teach to too young learners
as it is unlikely that they are able to comprehend such a complicated matter.
* Minimal pair drills: These relate to words which differ by only one phoneme. Normally,
learners are allowed to listen to the tape and distinguish between the two sounds. This type
of activities is particularly useful to teach sounds which cause difficulties for learners or
sounds that are easily mismatched. After listening, learners are asked to produce the sounds
themselves.
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* Contextualized minimal pairs: When minimal pair drills seem a bit boring and too
theoretical with separated sounds, their contextualization compensates for this weakness.
The sentence stem serves as a basis for students to produce appropriate responses with
correct pronunciation. When words are put in sentences, it seems to be more useful than the
vague minimal pairs because it is more practical.
* Tongue twisters: When other techniques look serious and sometimes put learners under
much pressure, tongue twisters provide a more delighting way to learn pronunciation.
Sounds which are difficult to differentiate are put together to make meaningful sentences.
This technique rooted from speech correction strategies for native speakers. One of the
most typical examples for this technique is the sentence, “She sells seashells by the
seashore.”
* Practice of vowel shifts and stress shifts related by affixation: This is a useful
technique in which students are taught how stress and vowel shift by affixation. Many
learners have the habit of pronounce a new-formed word according to the pronunciation of
the root one. For example, they tend to pronounce the sounds of Exhibition like the sound
of Exhibit. With the help of the teacher, learners are more aware of some rules for shifting
stress and vowels, as well as are more aware that they should check first before making any
generalization relating to word formation’s pronunciation.
* Reading aloud/recitation: Students are provided with a passage or scripts and then read
aloud, focusing on stress, timing and intonation. This activity is often done with texts such
as poems, rhymes, song lyrics, etc. It is true that reading aloud is not popular in English

2000:10). According to Roach (1998), vowels can be classified in terms of:
(1) The height of the bulk of the tongue in the mouth
(2) The front/back position of the tongue in the mouth
(3) The degree of lip-rounding
(4) The length of vowels
(Roach, 1998: 13-14)
As for consonant sounds, Roach (2000:10) defined them as “sounds in which there is
obstruction to the flow of air as it passes the larynx to the lips.” As consonant sounds were
the main issue of this research, we would like to propose the classification of English
consonant sounds in Table 1 below.
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Table 1: English consonant sounds
Bilabial Labio
dental
Dental Alveolar Palato-
alveolar
Palatal Velar Glotal
Plosive + b
- p
+ d
- t
+ g
- k
Fricative + v + ð + z
- s
+ ʒ
- ∫
- h
Affricate + f - θ
+ dʒ

grammar is, their wrong intonation may cause misinterpretation to the listeners. In addition,
one sentence’s meaning can be altered by different types of intonation a speaker uses. Thus,
learners should be taught how to achieve sensible intonation so as not to let it interfere with
the meaning of what they really want to say.
However, it is not an easy task to teach intonation to learners as it is largely affected by a
number of factors, among which one of the most important factors is the learners’
competence of language. If a learner is unable to find an appropriate word in time due to his
lack of vocabulary, then he cannot have a smooth intonation. This results from the fact that
he will have to spend a certain amount of time to think of a particular word.
4/ Other aspects of connected speech
The master of pronouncing English sounds is not enough to achieve good pronunciation as
it is a complicated issue. Apart from the individual sounds, learners have to be competent
on the use of intonation and a vast number of other aspects relating to connected speech. If
English is spoken in a very careful and slow way, such as when delivering a speech, or
having a lecture, these aspects do not appear much. They are most used in casual and rapid,
everyday speech. That is the reason why it is much more difficult to teach learners these
aspects in the class, where the environment for listening to authentic communication is
limited.
* Assimilation
Kelly (2000) defines assimilation as the modification of sounds on each other when they
meet, usually across word boundaries, but can also within words. Assimilation is said to be
progressive when a sound influences a following sound, or regressive when a sound
influences one which precedes it. In other words, this means in the preparation steps for
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pronouncing a coming sound, the previous sound is often altered. It is not pronounced in
full, but only partly. That is the reason why as stated before, assimilation does not receive
attention in careful speech, when utterances are spoken at a very slow speed.
* Elision
The term elision means “the disappearance of a sound” (Kelly, 2000: 110). This
phenomenon, once again, usually refers to rapid speech rather than careful one. In saying an

status and education.
However, today, there are a vast number of English, such as American English, Australian
English, etc. They are also employed in all fields of life. Even within countries where
English is the native language, it has a great number of variables. Take the UK, for
example, people in the North and in the South have different accents.
Thus, it is vital to decide what model of English pronunciation to teach, and for what
reasons the teacher makes such a decision. However, the truth is that the teacher himself is
often unable to produce a “perfect” accent without being affected by his own language.
Some teachers may modify their accents, but actually this can only be to some certain
extend. Another troublesome problem is that one student is taught by many teachers, with
different accent. In addition, each student may have his/her own preference due to some
inner motivation. Some of them may want to study Australian English because they wish to
study further in Australia, for example. Therefore, it is virtually impossible to state what is
the “correct accent”, what is not. Normally, the teacher would allow the students to choose
whatever accent they want to develop, provided that it is widely comprehensible. The
teacher should teach the accent that they can use the best, and adequately inform students
about the existence of other varieties.
2.2.4 Intelligibility
Apart from identifying clearly the kind of pronunciation that will by employed and taught
to students, another important issue that needs raising is the question of the pronunciation
goal, i.e. the level of pronunciation required from the learners. Locke and Latham (1990)
claims that human action is caused by purposes, and goals have to be set and pursued by
choice so as for the action to take place. Without a clear goal in mind, people do not know
what to work for. Another important issue relating to goals is that goals should be
attainable, but not easy to achieve. This means approaching a goal must be a difficult
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process, so that people have to try hard. However, if it is an impossible goal, they will
gradually lose motivation and do not want to continue the pursuit.
As stated before, it is virtually impossible to require students to have a “perfect English
pronunciation”, because this seems to be also impossible even for the teachers.

learning English may be easier than learning Chinese, because of the fact that both English
and Vietnamese are Latin ones, whereas Chinese is a hieroglyphic language. However,
some English sounds do not exist in Vietnamese such as /ʒ/, /∫/, /θ/, /ð/. Therefore, many
Vietnamese learners are unable to produce those sounds correctly.
2/ The age factor
It is often assumed that the younger a person starts learning foreign languages, the better he
is at pronouncing it and therefore, a greater chance of having a native-like accent. Oyama
(1976) conducted a research whose subjects were sixty male Italian-born immigrants. They
were tape-recorded reading aloud a short paragraph and telling a story about a frightening
episode in their lives (completely unprepared or rehearsed). Their pronunciation was judged
by two experts based on a five point scale, ranging from “no foreign accent” to “heavy
foreign accent”. The results showed that the younger a person was when he started learning
English, the more native-like was his accent.
Nevertheless, other researches showed opposite results. Snow and Hoefnagel-Hohle (1975)
conducted a research which had two parts. The first part was a laboratory study in which
136 subjects (British English people who were learning Dutch as a second language in
Holland) were asked to listen and imitate five Dutch words. The results showed that the two
oldest groups of learners (eight 17-year-olds and seven 21-31-year-olds) had the highest
achievement, whereas the youngest groups had the lowest scores (ten 5-year-olds and ten 6-
year-olds). The second part was a long-term study in which the subjects were tested in
much the same way at intervals during their first year of studying Dutch. This time, at first,
older learners seemed to get better results. However, after four to five months, there seemed
to be no significant age difference among the results of those subjects.
Therefore, we can come to a conclusion that there is no trusted evidence relating to the
relationship between age and a person’s ability to pronounce a new language. Even if the
age factor is a problem, nothing can be done for the learners. It is the learners’ choice when
to start learning a foreign language and therefore, virtually impossible for teachers to
interfere.
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3/ Amount of exposure

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will become more careful with their speaking, and gradually build up good pronunciation
competence. Moreover, it is the truth that many students have great concern for their
pronunciation. They always seek for feedback from the teacher on how they speak.
Sometimes, it is the fact that they feel unable to pronounce a word correctly that inhibits
them from the desire to speak any more.
7/ The teacher’s role
In teaching pronunciation, the teacher is expected to play an important role in guiding and
helping learners. According to Kenworthy (1987: 1), the teacher has to perform the
following roles:
* Helping learners hear: The teacher has a mission to provide appropriate input of the
target sounds for learners to hear. If such a provision is not available, learners are likely to
have misconceptions about the target language and perceive the sounds in a wrong way.
Thus, they will be unable to produce genuine sounds and utterances.
* Helping learners make sounds: It is true that some English sounds do not exist in the
learners’ mother tongue. Some learners may be able to imitate the target sounds if they are
provided models. However, for those who lack such ability, it is the teacher’s task to
explain the way those difficult sounds are made and provide aid to help learners produce
correct sounds.
* Providing feedback: Like any other aspect of teaching, feedback is very important in the
sense that it helps learners know where they are standing, how much they have gained and
what they need to improve. As for pronunciation, this is of vital importance because in
many cases, learners may make overgeneralization about the way English is pronounced
based on the way English words are spelt. Besides, learners may be unaware that they are
persistently making the same pronunciation mistakes. The teacher must, therefore, provide
necessary and appropriate feedback to learners.
* Pointing out what is going on: In many cases, learners fail to realize what and how they
are speaking. As speaking is for the most part unconsciously controlled, learners may
sometimes make mistakes in the way they produce a particular sequence of sounds, or put
stress in an incorrect place, leading to misunderstanding. It is the teacher’s role to specify

“provide opportunities for the learner to make adjustments and improvements toward
mastery of a specified standard.”
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A further investigation finds out that there are some kinds of feedback, also specified in the
dictionary, namely auditory feedback, delayed auditory feedback and kinesthetic feedback.
As for the purpose of the research, for the sake of improving the students’ pronunciation,
we would like to present the first two ones.
When a person speaks, they can hear what they are saying, and can use this information to
monitor their speech and to correct any mistakes. This is called auditory feedback.
This means this is a type of feedback that comes from the learners themselves, or we may
call self-feedback. It is particularly common in speaking. When students make some
mistakes, they discover it immediately after they speak. Then, they provide correction
immediately. This type of feedback does not involve the role of the teacher. For example,
one student says:
“I would like a room for two nights /laits/.”
She may discover that she has mispronounced night right at the time she speaks.
Then, she can continue to say “I mean nights. /naits/”
Another type of feedback which we find particularly effective in the teaching and learning
of pronunciation is delayed auditory feedback. This is “a technique which shows how
speakers depend on auditory feedback (i.e. hearing what have just said) when speaking. In
studies of delayed auditory feedback, speakers wear earphones through which they hear
what they have said, but after a short delay. The effect of this on speakers is that it is very
difficult for them to speak normally.” It is commonly observed that students find it difficult
to identify the mistakes made by themselves. It is the fact that we seem to discover mistakes
made by other people rather than those made by our own. For example, in peer-checking
lesson in a writing class, some students are very good at pointing out the mistakes made by
their partners when they edit their partners’ writing versions. However, they themselves
may make the same mistakes in their own writing drafts.
This problem gets worse with speaking skill in general and pronunciation in particular. If
one student makes mistakes in a writing draft, when the teacher or another student points

situation, or how should teachers provide feedback to students are not easy to answer.
2.4.2 Research into the use of corrective feedback
The term corrective feedback is considered by some researchers to be rooted from the
Output Hypothesis proposed by Swain (1985). When conducting a research in a class where
school students learn French, she found out that despite the fact that the students hardly
encountered any difficulties in understanding the teacher’s instructions in French, their
production often lacked accuracy. Therefore, she came to a conclusion, which is the Output
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Hypothesis, that “comprehensive input alone does not improve learners’ language
acquisition in terms of syntax,” and “the production of output in response to input is
necessary for further language development.” She also argued that modified output is
necessary for second language mastery. Furthermore, modified output could result from the
ample opportunities for output and the provision of useful and consistent feedback from
teachers and peers. More specifically, modified output can be a form of learner uptake, or
learner reaction to corrective feedback given to learners’ error. Therefore, corrective
feedback can be regarded as “a pedagogical means of offering modified input to students,
which could consequently lead to modified output by the students.”
Following this research, Long (1985) clarified the relationship between input, teacher-
learner interaction and acquisition as follows:
(1) interactional modification makes input comprehensible
(2) comprehensible input promotes acquisition
(3) interactional modification promotes acquisition
Another theory which served as a basic ground for the discussion of the significance of
using corrective feedback was proposed by White (1987, 1989). She argued that if second
language learners aim at achieving native-like proficiency, it is necessary that there must be
a provision of negative evidence, which is information about what is ungrammatical. This is
particularly essential when learners seem to over-generalize rules in their first language to
produce the second language. Therefore, it is of vital importance that learners should be
pointed out what is wrong in their original utterances so as to build up better output.
A later issue that is worth looking into is the question of how error treatment should be

to justify its effect on the students’ performance. As for pronunciation, the effect of
feedback has not been adequately exploited. This, once again, motivated us to carry out a
research on it.
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CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGY
In the following part, the researcher provides a detailed description of the research’s
methodology. Firstly, we present the argument for the choice of applying feedback to
improve students’ pronunciation and the justification for the use of an action research.
3.1 Argument for the use of continuous feedback to improve first year students’
English pronunciation
First and foremost, we would like to justify the reasons for our decision to use continuous
feedback to help first year students of English improve their pronunciation, although the
literature review shows that there is little research carried out in this field so far.
3.1.1 A further analysis on factors that can help improve learners’ pronunciation
As can be seen clearly from the analysis of the factors that affect learners’ pronunciation
(see 2.3), as well as the teacher’s role in helping learners achieve better pronunciation, the
question that should be raised now is: “Which of those factors can teaching and training
have impact on?” If an appropriate answer can be found, we can utilize them to help
students gain better pronunciation.
When we examined the factors again, it is evident that some factors cannot be changed,
such as the age factor, the native language, and the phonetic ability of the students. These
are the factors that no alternations can be made. The teacher also seems unable to increase
the amount of exposure for learners due to the fact that English classes only take place over
a certain limit length of time in a day and in a week. Moreover, the teacher cannot be sure
whether learners have a chance to use it outside the class, as well as whether they want to
do it or not. As for learners’ attitude toward the foreign language, the teacher can stimulate
it by providing more authentic materials so as to raise learners’ love for it. However, this is
often done only to some extend due to the fact that some learners may not be interested in
such provision. In short, these factors are somehow out of the teacher’s control.
However, there is one factor that clearly can be improved so as to bring the most benefits to