SKKN Figure out some common pronunciation mistakes by 10 grade students at Xuan Hoa high school and suggest some solutions to improve pronunciation teaching

 SỞ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO VĨNH PHÚC
 TRƯỜNG TRUNG HỌC PHỔ THÔNG XUÂN HÒA
 BÁO CÁO KẾT QUẢ 
 NGHIÊN CỨU, ỨNG DỤNG SÁNG KIẾNCẤP CƠ SỞ
 Tên sáng kiến: “figure out some common pronunciation 
 mistakes by 10 grade students at Xuan hoa high school 
 AND SUGGEST SOME SOLUTIONS TO IMPROVE PRONUNCIATION 
 TEACHING”
 Tác giả sáng kiến:Trịnh Thu Hường
 Ngày sinh: 23/06/1983
 Chuyên môn: Thạc sỹ Tiếng Anh
 Mã sáng kiến: 376102
 Vĩnh phúc 2/2020
Table of content 1. Introduction
In the economic integration process, English has become an important key to get a 
good career. Understanding the importance of English, Vietnamese government 
has paid more and more attention to teaching and learning English at High 
Schools. The English textbooks give teachers a chance to teach all skills (Reading, 
Speaking, Writing, Listening), instead of focusing on grammar like before. Now, 
accurate pronunciation is very important. This helps students communicate English 
better.
As an English teacher with more than 10 years of experience at a high school, the 
author has found out that accurate pronunciation is basic but most of the students 
have problems in pronunciation.
When teaching English for 10th grade students at Xuan Hoa High School, the 
author of this research realised that many students feel less confident in their 
speaking lessons for the reason of bad pronunciation. In order to improve the 
quality of teaching and learning English, the author investigated the common 
pronunciation mistakes by students and suggest some solutions to this problem. 
Firstly, The recordings were used to examine the existence of students’ mistakes in 
pronunciation. After that, the interviews were conducted to address the causes. A 
total of 130 tenth grade students at Xuan Hoa High School took part in the survey. 
From the answers of the students, the author stated that the tendency of students’ 
pronunciation mistakes were obvious. Based on the findings, the author proposed 
some strategies for teachers and students to improve the quality of teaching and 
learning pronunciation. 
2. Name of the research: “figure out some common pronunciation mistakes by 10 
 grade students at Xuan hoa high school AND SUGGEST 
 SOME SOLUTIONS TO IMPROVE PRONUNCIATION TEACHING”
Abstract 
 In the process of integration and globalization, English is rapidly becoming 
an indispensable instrument in community communication. It is being used world-
wide as the main language in business, trading, communication, etc. Therefore, 
more and more people learn English as foreign language and wish to be able to 
master it as their mother tongue. Learners cannot succeed in studying English 
without mastering English pronunciation because pronunciation is one of the most 
important components of a language. It is really very important for learners to have 
communication of the target language as correct possible right from the start.
For high school students, they not only pay attention to pronounce correctly but 
also want to know the mistakes and how to correct them. Though many studies 
have been carried out on correct pronunciation, yet few studies have been done on 
some common mistakes in English pronunciation alone. This minor study was 
carried out with an attempt to investigate into difficulties in learning English 
pronunciation for students at Xuan Hoa High School and find solutions for 
teaching pronunciation. The methodology was used in the study including utilizing 
questionnaires, interviews and class observation. The study was undertaken in 
three classes with nearly 130 ten grade students at Xuan Hoa High School. The 
results of the research showed that the students mainly find it difficult to 
pronounce correctly, distinguish sounds, and use stress and intonation. The results 
also showed a significant effect of teachers’ teaching methods on students’ attitude 
and motivation towards learning pronunciation.
I. Introduction 
1. Pronunciation Description in Language Teaching and Learning Example: Shake/ sake Sheet/ seat
Problem: Speakers allow the air stream to flow over the sides of the tongue instead 
of the middle and their mouth is not rounded when they pronounce / /
+ /d / is confused with /j /
Example: Just / yet jelly / yell, July
Problem: The tongue slides too quickly to the next sound without touching the 
alveolar
+ /d / is confused with / /
Example: Judge/ just virgin/ version
Problem: Vietnamese students do not often notice the difference between these two 
sounds. Instead of inserting the sound /d / before making the sound / /, speakers 
pronounce rightly from / /
+/ / is confused with /s /
Example: Thin / sin thigh / sigh
Problem: In stead of putting the tongue between the teeth, speakers keep it right 
behind the teeth when pronounce / / 
+/ / is confused with /z /
Example: Then /zen
Problem: In stead of putting the tongue between the teeth, speakers keep their 
tongue behind the teeth when pronounce / / 
+/tr / is confused with /ch / in Vietnamese
Example: tray / chây trend / chen
Problem: / tr / included two sounds / t / and / r / which are pronounced fast and 
gliding from 
/ t / to / r /. But students often hear them as one sound and mispronounce them as / 
ch /. 
+/t / is confused with /ch / in Vietnamese
Example: Chuck / chắc chick/ chích 2. The native speakers may find it difficult to understand them.
 High school students in Vietnam often pronounce words without using stress 
 because there is no stress in Vietnamese. They always pronounce every word with 
 the equal force and that is the reason why they find it difficult to listen to the native 
 speakers and the tapes. 
 2.What needs to be taught?
 First, pronunciation teaching has to be integrated with other aspects of 
 language (grammar, vocabulary, style, function, discourse) and other skills 
 (listening comprehension, speaking, reading, writing, with non-linguistic cues e.g. 
 gestures, facial expressions etc.), as an integral part of language teaching program 
 from the early stages till the achievement of intelligibility with the motto “frequent 
 practice makes perfects”, “little and often”.
 Second, to achieve the intelligibility with satisfactory accuracy and fluency in 
 pronunciation, integrated with other language aspects and skills for successful 
 communication, items of pronunciation need to be isolated for practice in words, 
 phrases then reintroduced in their contexts (sentence, short texts etc.) for the 
 successful development of communication. This second principle serves the first 
 one.
 In order to have good pronunciation students should be taught English 
 phonetics, they should know the consonant and vowel sounds, the organ of speech, 
 stress and even the differences between English and Vietnamese sounds.
 Consequently, the purpose of this study is to investigate the difficulties in 
 learning English pronunciation for High School students. The major research 
 questions are as follows:
1. What are common pronunciation errors made by students at Xuan Hoa High 
 School?
2. How do teachers’ methods of teaching affect students’ motivation and attitude 
 toward learning pronunciation? Only 26,7% often listen to the tapes and CDs. 39,5% of students look up the 
pronunciation of words when checking in dictionary because 76% of them don’t 
know how to pronounce a word from its phonetic transcription. We also realized 
that the numbers of students who take care of their pronunciation improvement is 
very far from our expectations because there are only 14% watch TV and 13% 
reading newspapers and magazines in English.
 The result was showed in the below table.
 Techniques Number of students 
 ( % )
Listening to the tapes and CDs 26,7
Checking words in phonetic transcription in 39,5
dictionary 
Watching TV channels in English 14
Reading newspapers and magazines 13
 Table 2 
 III. Main findings and discussion
 In response to the two research questions, the results were shown in table 1 
and table 2. The main parts of learning pronunciation that our students found 
difficult to study respectively are: Sound, intonation and stress. The second finding 
is that students didn’t know how to take advantages of techniques and other 
sources of information to improve their English pronunciation. Additionally, most 
of them were not taught about how to pronounce a word from its phonetic 
transcription. The last interesting finding is that students found excited and 
motivated towards learning pronunciation when teachers use visual aids, model 
sentences with standard accent. From these findings, the study suggested that 
teaching pronunciation requires teachers to deeply understand what students 
‘difficulties are in order to design suitable activities. Below are some applicable 
solutions To sum up, the errors which are most important to correct are those which may 
easily lead to lack of comprehension, or which make the speech “uncomfortable” 
to listen to; by the same principle, errors which produce no comprehension 
problems but simply make the speech slightly foreign sounding may not need 
correcting. 
V. Conclusion 
 In conclusion, this study focuses on under- research- topic; therefore, there is 
no doubt about its notable contribution to the study of English speaking of either 
students or English teachers. It provides readers with common pronunciation errors 
in English that High School students may make. As few students can recognize 
their own pronunciation errors and know how to rectify them. Moreover, this can 
also be used as a reference for their student’s pronunciation errors and to suggest 
some solutions
While conducting this study, I encountered a problem of lack of materials relating 
to Vietnamese sounds and mistakes that Vietnamese students often make when 
speaking English. Thus, there may be other pronunciation errors that I have not 
fully comprehended.
Finally, to speak English correctly and appropriately, students are supposed not 
only to study English sounds but English stress and intonation as well.