I really want to make sure that my thesic is stored during the long period of teaching at Le Hong Phong High school. It is not copied by anyone

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One: INTRODUCTION	2
1.1 Background and rationale	2
1.2 Aims of the study	2
1.3 Significance of the study	3
Chapter Two: METHODOLOGY	4
2.1Study setting	 4
2.2. Participants	 4
2.3. Empirical teaching of ACS 	 4
	 2.3.1 The practice of ACS 	 4
	2.3.1.1 Preparation stage	 4
	2.3.1.1.1 Material selection	 4
	2.3.1.1.2 Activities for teaching ACS	 4
	 	2.3.1.2 The teaching of ACS in practice	 6
	2.3.1.3 Pre-test and post-test	 7
	 2.3.2 Evaluative instruments	 7
	2.4 Analytical framework 	 7
Chapter Three: DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION	8
3.1 Results from the diagnostic test	 8
3.1.1 Problems with rhythm	 8
 3.1.2 Problems with assimilation	 8
 3.1.3 Problems with elision	 9
 3.1.4 Problems with linking	9
3.2 Results from the achievement test(the Post-test)	 10
Chapter Four: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS	13
4.1 Conclusion	 13
4.2 Recommendations for applying ACS	 14
 4.2.1 The practitioners of ACS and teachers of English	 14
 4.2.2 Educational administrators	 14
4.3 Strategies for teaching ACS	 15
 4.3.1 Strategies for teaching rhythm	 15
 4.3.2 Strategies for teaching linking	 15
 4.3.3 Strategies for teaching assimilation and elision	 16
 4.4 5.4 Suggestions for further study	 17
REFERENCES 	 18
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the study
It is common knowledge that English has become an international language and in Vietnam especially, it is nowadays considered crucial to job-seekers and scholarship hunters, as well as pursuers of higher education. Thus, more and more students are taking international tests such as TOEFL and IELTS to find educational opportunities at overseas universities, and the TOEIC certificate is presently required by many Vietnamese universities as a necessary condition for graduation. It is not just the matter of compulsory document that counts; a great number of Vietnamese people are learning how to better communicate in English because the 21th century is the era of globalization, in which English is the common language for most interactions, as stated by James (2001): “English is the language of globalization, of international business, politics... It is the language of computers and the Internet... it is the dominant international language in communications, science, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomacy....” 
Aspects of connected speech (hereafter reduced to ACS) belong to the supra-segmental sphere of phonetics and phonology which includes various issues, namely rhythm, assimilation, elision, and linking. All of them exert a certain impact on the learner’s oral communication because their object is language in action and the interrelation between words in a sentence and even between sentences. Notwithstanding such significance, these items have so far not been given commensurate recognition both from teachers and students at a high school level. Here arises a question about whether it is possible to make the foreign language learning situation at high schools better through the introduction of basic knowledge about distinctive aspects of connected speech and whether the target students can incorporate this knowledge with their rudimentary command of segmental phonetics to achieve success in real-life communication. The course of finding the answer to this question thus gives reason for the being of this study.
1.2 Aim of the study
Aspects of connected speech are too large a subject to study in full detail together with its pedagogical application within the limit of a research. Therefore, the researcher would hereby certify that only basic features of the aspects of connected speech that help to improve learners’ oral communication will be examined.
With the scope defined above, the thesis aims at finding out the problems related to ACS faced by the students when they take part in authentic communication situations. The researcher would, through this study, also like to investigate if the educational values of ACS can help the students better their oral communication, and assert the fact that aspects of connected speech should be introduced at a high school level to improve the students’ oral skill.
1.3 Significance of the study
The notion of bringing parts of the supra-segmental features, i.e. ACS, into the teaching of English at high schools in Vietnam in general and at Le Hong Phong High School in particular has never been officially reported, so this research may complement the current practice of teaching and learning English at such educational institutions. 
The study is intended for the advance of the students in oral communication. It can, therefore, be hailed as a contribution to changing the viewpoints on teaching the oral skill, which hopefully bears fruit in reaching the standard of natural English.
CHAPTER 2
METHODOLOGY
In order to fulfill the aims of this study and come up with the answers to the research questions introduced in Chapter 1, the following methods are employed to carry out the study. 
2.1 Study setting 
The study was conducted at Le Hong Phong High School for the pupils in Thanh Hoa Province. The school’s main targets are to train excellent students for the annual national exams and to teach them toward the university entrance exams so that they can stand a better chance of getting a place in the universities of their choice. With these targets in mind, both teachers and students have to work hard together and the quality of teaching and learning at the school has been very good according to the ranking of the Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training.
2.2 Participants
The study was carried out with 82 participants from the two classes 10A2 English-major and 10A6, literature-majored aged 16, who had been learning English intensively for a year. These students were introduced to ACS after taking the pre-test with a view to discovering the progress made in their oral communication. 
2.3 Empirical application of ACS
2.3.1 The practice of ACS
	The practice of ACS consists of 2 stages, namely preparation and implementation. The preparation stage revolves around the tasks of choosing the materials for introducing ACS to the students and creating the attractive activities to help them acquire ACS at their best. The second stage, implementation focuses on reviewing the practicality of teaching ACS at Le Hong Phong High School.
2.3.1.1 Preparation stage
2.3.1.1.1 Material selection
	This is the first year (2014) when the new text book English 10, obviously designed to target communicative proficiency, is brought into its experimental stage. Meritoriously, Le Hong Phong High school has been teaching this well-tailored material. It is, therefore, convenient to utilise the speaking-skill sections of the book to introduce ACS.
2.3.1.1.2 Activities for teaching ACS
	The activities for teaching ACS were selected and adapted from the those recommended by Celce-Murcia et al. (1996, pp. 8-9). However, only appropriate activities were used in the class because the researcher reckoned that it was beneficial to focus on some specific drills rather than applying too many kinds of them, which might result in the students’ distraction from the points being taught. 
Some of the in-class activities are described in details in the table below.
Activities
Aims
Group work
Preparation
Procedure
Listen and Imitate 
Help acquaint the students with the rhythmic pattern of English as well as other ACS.
Help teacher keep track of students’ performance and detect any problems encountered by them.
The whole class repeat in chorus, then students drill individually. 
The tasks adapted from the book and the videos downloaded from Youtube.
Let students watch the videos or listen to the recording then ask them to repeat after the voice they hear.
Teacher explains further with the theories of ACS.
 Students practice by themselves and then present in front of the class.
Speed dictation
Enhance students’ recognition of the sounds.
Give students an opportunity to be exposed to natural English.
 Work in group
Choose the suitable videos or recordings.
Ask students to group themselves to compete against other groups in the class.
Hand out pieces of paper for them to write down what they hear.
Teacher decides the winner by comparing the students’ result with the reading.
Back-chaining
Familiarize the students with ACS such as linking, elision and rhythm. 
In groups or individually
- Prepare the back-chaining sentences at home.
Ask students to repeat in chorus.
Call on some students to repeat individually.
Ask for volunteer to repeat the long back-chaining sentences using ACS.
Jumbled pictures
Help students use English naturally through story-telling.
 Enhance teamwork spirit and the students’ creativity in using language. 
In groups
- Make photocopies of the pictures.
- Prepare handouts of suggested stories. 
Divide the students into 6 groups.
Assign 2 groups the same pictures of the same stories and ask them to rearrange the pictures to make a logical story.
Ask a representative from each group to tell their story to the class.
“The Pursuit of words” game
Help students practice ACS with fun.
Improve students’ natural reaction in using ACS. 
- In groups or individually 
- Prepare pictures of different themes with ideas or words hidden in them.
- Prepare gifts for the winners.
Put the students into groups.
Explain the rules of the game to the students.
Ask the students to study the pictures carefully in 20 seconds and then speak out the words, phrases, or sentences the pictures suggest.
Act it out!
To improve students’ oral fluency by using ACS.
Give students more drills on ACS.
In groups
- Prepare handouts of short conversations involving two or more speakers.
Instruct students to act out the conversation using ACS.
Choosing a board of judges to decide the winner.
2.3.1.2 The teaching of ACS in practice
	The knowledge of ACS was introduced to the students for a duration of 8 fourty-five-minute periods. The prominent characteristics of the instruction of ACS are summarized as follows.
At the very start of the academic year, the objectives of and rationale for introducing ACS were clarified to the students so that they could be prepared for attending the experimental teaching that would come later. The teacher and researcher then set out to prepare the prerequisites for teaching ACS such as the lesson plans, the suitable activities, and teaching aids before embarking on guiding the students to obtain ACS. As for the activities employed for teaching ACS, the researcher adapted the techniques and games as reviewed by Kelly (2000) and Celce-Murcia et al. (1996) which were discussed earlier in the previous chapter. Those activities include chaining, role-playing, miming, listening and imitating, using visual aids, etc. The selection of specific techniques and activities was largely based on the researcher’s teaching experience and was clearly stated in the sample lesson plan. 
2.3.2 Evaluative instruments
	The instruments that the researcher employed to sort out the results of the value of ACS were a pre- and post-test.
2.3.2.1 Pre-test and post-test
 In order to test the students’ performance in oral communication in association with ACS, a pre-test was designed based on the foundation laid out in Chapter 2. A set of twelve sentences was formed substantializing the different aspects of connected speech. For the convenience of analysis, the test was put into 4 parts. The first three sentences were supposed to test the students on rhythm, the next three on assimilation, then on elision, and the last three on linking. 
The post-test was actually the same as the pre-test to ensure the uniformity of the results collected so that the progress made could be clearly affirmed.
2.4 Analytical framework
Quantitative analysis of pre- and post-tests
To determine the extent of progress made by the students in using ACS to better their oral communication after experimental teaching, a detailed analysis of the test was carried out. The expected results from the scores gained by the students were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) of version 16.0. Firstly, it calculated the mean score of each part as well as the total score of the pre- and post-test. Then a paired samples t-test was run to analyze any statistical difference in the mean gains between the pre- and post-test. Some relevant statistical values such as standard deviation, degrees of freedom (d.f.), and Sig. were also included to give evidence to the researcher’s conclusion of the students’ improvement in oral communication.
CHAPTER 3
DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
This chapter analyzes and discusses the students’ results as obtained from the pre-test and post-tests’ scores. The analysis and discussion of findings chapter serves to discover the students’ difficulties in using ACS in communication and to find out the best approach to help them effectively learn to use ACS in oral communication naturally.
3.1 Results from the diagnostic test (Pre-test)
The test consisted of 12 questions covering all four aspects of connected speech surveyed in the study. It required the students to read the model sentences in a way as natural as possible to the best of their ability. Therefore, this section is further split up into the four themes closely following these aspects of connected speech: rhythm, assimilation, elision, and linking. They will be presented in turn in the following four sub-sections.
3.1.1 Problems with rhythm 
	Amongst the 45 testees, a substantial number of 31 students that accounted for 68.9% scored good points (little or no problem) in the first three questions regarding rhythm. This is followed by a less crowded group of 14 students (31.1%) who exposed the sole problem of not lending proper weight to different words in a sentence. These students had a few problems with syllable-timed rhythm; they, however, had difficulty dealing with stress-timed rhythm and seemed to treat every word with equal importance resulting in the monotonous and non-rhythmic speech. The data collected are presented in the following table.
Problems
Rhythm
Raw count
Percentage
No or little problem 
31
68.9%
Problems with stress-timed rhythm
14
31.1%
Students’ problems with rhythm
3.1.2 Problems with assimilation
The next three questions of the test were engineered for judging the students’ performance related to assimilation. The researcher noticed a stark contrast to the favorable result obtained from analyzing the first three questions, which was presented in the chart below.
	Students’ problems with assimilation
The chart clearly manifests the lack of knowledge of ACS in casual oral communication. All the respondents, as expected, could not handle regressive and coalescent assimilation; thus the output received revealed their unnaturalness in actual speech. The only part of assimilation that the students proved to have no difficulty acquiring was to pronounce sequences of sibilant or stop consonants with only 8.9% failing to satisfy the examiner.
3.1.3 Problems with elision
The third part of the test looked into the students’ difficulty with elision. Among the 34 test-takers, almost none showed serious problems in elision of weak vowels and /v/ in /əv/, but up to 64.4% underwent a hard time pronouncing consonant clusters. They tended to pronounce all the consonants clearly, which makes their speech awkward and adversely affects fluency. The table below summarizes the statistics discussed above.
Type of problems
Elision
Raw count
Percentage
Problems with weak vowels 
2
4.4%
Problems with elision of /v/ in /əv/
1
2.2%
Problems with consonant clusters
29
64.4%
Students’ problems with elision
	The figures suggest a telling sign of great difficulties faced by students when they deal with consonant clusters. As Loc (2008) asserts, there are no cases of three consonants standing one after another in a word in Vietnamese (i.e. the students’ mother tongue); therefore, it causes a real hindrance to students’ acquisition of this aspect.
3.1.4 Problems with linking
The final test items served the researcher’s purpose of finding out the students’ trouble associated with linking sounds in English. While the students reported in their questionnaires that they were familiar with linking, in practice many a problem were pinpointed. Out of the 45 participants, more than a half (53.3%) did not link ending consonants to vowels in their speech. The results were even more appalling as far as other linking techniques were concerned. No single testee utilized glides in cases of two vowels standing one after another, and the same situation applied to the case of intrusive /r/. The data for these questions are visualized as follows.
Students’ use of linking techniques
	To sum up, the results of the pre-test brought to light the fact that the students did not have an adequate knowledge of ACS and they could not effectively apply what they assumingly had known in real life practice of producing natural speech. 
3.2 Results from the achievement test (Post-test)
	After 4 weeks (with a total of 8 forty-five-minute periods) of reviewing the knowledge of ACS, the students took the test again and the results were analyzed against those of the pre-test so that the researcher could assess the progress made by the students by comparing the two. The statistics are illustrated in the following table:
Problems
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Pre-test
31.1%
100%
100%
8.9%
2.2%
64.4%
53.3%
100%
100%
Post-test
11.1%
24.4%
11.1%
4.4%
2.2%
17.7%
13.3%
62.2%
71.1%
Table 4.3: Students’ results of the two tests
Legends for the nine problems as shown in the table above are explained right below: 
Problem 1: Failure in using stress-timed rhythm
Problem 2: Failure in using regressive assimilation
Problem 3: Failure in using coalescent assimilation
Problem 4: Failure in using assimilation related to sequences of consonants
Problem 5: Failure in omitting /v/ in /əv/
Problem 6: Failure in using elision for consonant clusters
Problem 7: Failure in linking consonants to vowels
Problem 8: Failure in using intrusive /r/ to link vowels
Problem 9: Failure in using glides to link vowels
As compared in Table 4.3, the extent of progress made by the students in overcoming their weaknesses was remarkable. Of the nine problems they faced in the pre-test, up to eight had been successfully tackled after 4 weeks reviewing ACS. The results of the post-test showed an upward trend with an impressive improvement witnessed in the case of using coalescent assimilation. In the pre-test no one among the student subjects could overcome the ordeal of utilizing this aspect. However, the number of the students who could use this with ease in their speech soared to 89.9 percent in the post-test. The two most problematic aspects for the students proved to be the use of the intrusive /r/ and glides in linking sounds. The pre-test reported a disappointing fact that all the students could not handle these aspects, and the results of the post-test still did not satisfy the researcher teacher because only a marginal number of them (37.8% and 29.9% respectively) could apply these linking techniques in their natural speech. Also noticeably, the students’ performance in dealing with regressive assimilation had revealed a wide discrepancy of 75.6% when the pre-test and post-test results were compared.
	The researcher then compared the mean gains after the two tests, and the statistics were shown in the table below.
Mean
N
Std. Deviation
Std. Error Mean
 Pair 1
Pretest
4.47
45
.968
.144
Posttest
6.62
45
1.072
.160
Table 4.4: Descriptive statistics of post-test scores
As can be observed from this table, the mean score of the post-test was 6.62, much higher than that of the pre-test with