- Problem statement Since English is one of the core subjects at school, more and more schools are teaching English to their pupils and English centres can be found popular in any cities in Vietnam, especially big cities. - However, many foreigners have commented “many Vietnamese speakers can speak English, but only a few have intelligible English pronunciation so that they can be understood easily in direct communication with foreigners.” Since the late 1980s, the course of teaching and learning English in Vietnam has gone through many changes, especially when the communicative approach became a buzzword among people in the fields of language education. - Since, learning a language means learning a new way of using the speech organs, new way of controlling the speech organs in order to produce sound peculiar to the new language, this process can be more difficult as some of the speech organs are not visible and their movements are far back in the pharyngeal cavity thus difficult to control. - Like learners elsewhere in the world, Vietnamese learners encounter great difficulties in learning English pronunciation for several reasons. - In an attempt to deal with the pronunciation problem of the students at the English department I have carried out this study to find out their common pronunciation errors. - The English Sounds 2.1.1 Fortis and lenis A voiceless/voiced pair such as [s, z] are distinguished not only by the presence or absence of voice but also by the degree of breath and muscular effort involved in the articulation. - in this stage, there is often an on-glide or transition audible in a preceding sound segment and visible in an acoustic analysis as characteristic curve of formants of the preceding sound. - vibration of the vocal cords. - Bilabial Plosives: /p, b/ The soft palate being raised and the nasal resonator shut off, the primary obstacle to the air-stream is provided by the closure of the lips. - Lung air is compressed behind this closure, during which stage the vocal cords are held wide apart for /p/, but may vibrate for all or part of the compression stage for /b/ according to its situation in the utterance. - Alveolar Plosives: /t, d/ The soft palate being raised and the nasal resonator shut off, the primary obstacle to the air-stream is formed by a closure made between the tip and rims of the tongue and the upper alveolar ridge and side teeth. - Lung air is compressed behind this closure, during which stage the vocal cords are wide apart for /t/, but may vibrate for all or part of the compression stage for /d/ according to its situation in the utterance. - The air escapes with noise upon the sudden separation of the alveolar closure. - Velar Plosives: /k, g/ The soft palate being raised and the nasal resonator shut off, the primary obstacle to the air-stream is formed by a closure made between the back of the tongue and the soft palate. - Lung air is compressed behind this closure, during which stage the vocal cords are wide apart for /k/, but may vibrate for all or part of the compression stage for /g/ according to its situation in the utterance. - The air passage escapes with noise upon the sudden separation of the velar closure. - Labio-dental Fricatives: /f, v/ The soft palate being raised and the nasal resonator shut off, the inner surface of the lower lip makes a light contact with the edge of the upper teeth, so that the escaping air produces friction. - Dental Fricatives: /ð, θ/ (Examples words: thumb, thus, either, father, breath, breathe) The soft palate being raised and the nasal resonator shut off, the tip and rims of the tongue make a light contact with the edge and inner surface of the upper incisors and a firmer contact with the upper side teeth, so that the air escaping between the forward surface of the tongue and the incisors causes friction. - Alveolar Fricatives: /s, z/ (Examples words: sip, zip, facing, rise, rice) The soft palate being raised and the nasal resonator shut off, the tip and blade of the tongue make a light contact with the upper alveolar ridge, and the side rims of the tongue a close contact with the upper side teeth. - The air-stream escapes through the narrow groove in the centre of the tongue and causes friction between the tongue and the alveolar ridge. - In other words, in the articulation of these sounds the air escapes through a narrow passage along the centre of the tongue, and the sound produces is comparatively intense. - The tongue is in contact with an area slightly further back than that for /s/, /z/. - The air escapes through a passage along the centre of the tongue, as in /s/ and /z/, but the passage is a little wider. - the friction occurring between a more extensive area of the tongue and the roof of the mouth. - In the case of / ʃ. - In the case of / ʒ/, however, the distribution is much more limited. - In the word ‘hat’, the /h/ must be followed by an / ổ / vowel. - In the articulation of / ʧ. - ʤ / the soft palate being raised and the nasal resonator shut off, the obstacle to the air-stream is formed by a closure made between the tip, blade, and rims of the tongue and the upper alveolar ridge and side teeth. - At the same time, the front of the tongue is raised towards the hard palate in readiness for the fricative release. - The closure is released slowly, the air escaping in a diffuse manner over the whole of the central surface of the tongue with friction occurring between the blade/front region of the tongue and the alveolar/front palatal section of the roof of the mouth. - but may be vibrating for all or part of / ʤ / according to the situation in the utterance. - the soft palate is lowered, adding the resonance of the nasal cavity to those of the pharynx and the mouth chamber closed by the lips. - the tongue will generally anticipate or retain the position of the adjacent vowel. - Alveolar Nasal: /n/ The tongue forms a closure with the teeth ridge and upper side teeth as for /t, d/. - the soft palate is lowered, adding the resonance of the nasal cavity to those of the pharynx and of that part of the mouth chamber behind the alveolar closure. - Velar Nasal: /ŋ/ A closure is formed in the mouth between the back of the tongue and the velum as for /k, g/ (the point of closure will depend on the type of vowel preceding). - the soft palate is lowered, adding the resonance of the nasal cavity to that of the pharynx and that small part of the mouth chamber behind the velar closure. - For clear [l], the front of the tongue is raised in the direction of the hard palate at the same time as the tip contact is made. - For dark [ł], the tip contact is again made on the teeth ridge, the front of the tongue being somewhat depressed and the back raised in the direction of the soft palate, giving a back vowel resonance. - The actual point of contact of the tongue for [ł] is conditioned by the place of articulation of the following consonant. - Variations of the plosives ( Alveolar Approximant: /r/ The most common allophone of RP /r/ is a voiced post-alveolar frictionless approximant. - The soft palate being raised and the nasal resonator shut off, the tip of the tongue is held in a position near to, but not touching, the rear part of the upper teeth ridge. - the central part of the tongue is lowered with a general contraction of the tongue. - The air stream is thus allowed to escape freely, without friction, over the centre part of the tongue. - Palatal Approximant: /j/ The vocalic allophones of RP /j/ are articulated by the tongue assuming the position for a front half-close to close vowel and moving away immediately to the position of the following sound. - Labio-velar Approximant: /w/ The vocalic allophones of RP /w/ are articulated by the tongue assuming the position for a back half-close to close vowel and moving away immediately to the position of the following sound. - The soft palate is raised and the vocal cords vibrate. - Variations of the Plosives As has been mentioned, all plosives can occur at the beginning of a word (initial position), between other sounds (medial position), and at the end of a word (final position). - There is then, in the post-release phase, a period during which air escapes through the vocal folds, making a sound like h. - The most noticeable and important difference, then, between initial p, t, k and b, d, g is the aspiration of the voiceless plosives p, t, k. - if there is voicing, it is at the beginning of the hold phase. - Following is the presentation of some variations of the plosives or stops in English. - the closure of the speech organs for the second consonant is made whilst the closure for the first consonant is still in position. - In the sequence of /pt/ this is what happens: the lips are closed for p and air is compressed as usual by pressure from the lungs. - then, with the lips still closed, the tongue-tip is placed on the alveolar ridge ready for /t/, so that there are two closures. - Then, and only then, the lips are opened, but there is no explosion of air because the tongue closure prevents the compressed air from bursting out of the mouth. - finally, the tongue-tip leaves the alveolar ridge and air explodes out of the mouth. - Nanal plosion: Stop + Nasal When /t/ or /d/ is followed by a syllabic /n/, the explosion of the stop takes place through the nose, e.g. - This nasal explosion happens in this way: the vocal organs form t or d in the usual way, with the soft palate raised to shut off the nasal cavity and the tongue-tip on the alveolar ridge, but instead of taking the tongue-tip away from the alveolar ridge to give the explosion we leave it in the same position and lower the soft palate, so that the breath explodes out of the nose rather than out of the mouth. - Lateral plosion: Stop + Lateral When the stop consonant /t/ or /d/ is followed by lateral /l/, the t and d are made with the tongue-tip on the alveolar ridge and the sides of the tongue firmly touching the sides of the palate. - /l/ is made with the tongue-tip touching the alveolar ridge, but the sides of the tongue away from the sides of the palate so that the breath passes out laterally. - The simplest way to go from /t/ or /d/ to /l/ is to leave the tongue-tip on the alveolar ridge and only lower the sides, and that is what we do. - the differences in the shape of the mouth are caused by different positions of the tongue and of the lips. - The quality of vowels is determined by the particular configuration of the vocal tract. - Different parts of the tongue may be raised or lowered. - The passage, through which the air travels, however, is never so narrow as to obstruct free flow of the air stream. - Thus vowels have been traditionally classified according to the three questions: How high is the tongue? What part of the tongue is involved. - Methodology This study was set up to answer the following question: What are the most common pronunciation problems of the students in the English department? The data collection was administered through an oral examination. - During the exam, each of the students was requested to present a talk about a particular topic in approximately five minutes. - While listening to students talking, the researcher took notes of the errors related to pronunciation. - The subjects of the study were students of the English department who had finished four years of English and took part in the final exam. - Unfortunately, it was impossible for the researcher to get equal number of male and female students since the researcher was assigned to be an examiner for one examination room out of more than twenty, and most of the students of the department were female. - Common errors found in the data Types of errors. - As has been shown in Table 1, there were three main types of errors found in the data. - In addition, some of the sounds, such as /ʒ, ʤ, ʧ / are really hard for Vietnamese learners to pronounce especially when these sounds occur at the end of words. - the air-stream escapes through the narrow groove in the centre of the tongue and causes friction between the tongue and the alveolar ridge. - This is normally difficult for Vietnamese learners because we do not have the same sound in our language, especially when this sound occurs at the final position of a word, the act of holding the tongue against the alveolar ridge for the air to pass through with some friction is a completely new concept for many learners. - The habit of “swallowing” the ending sound in the mother tongue is in fact a negative transference that inhibits the pronunciation of ending sounds in the target language. - However, in our data, most of the examples in which informants could not pronounce the words correctly include clusters of two or three consonants. - To most Vietnamese speakers, the completely different thing encountering Vietnamese learners is that all sounds in an English word should be pronounced, although some sounds in the middle may be partially pronounced, but the speech organs have to move to the required position and then move towards other position for the following sound. - The mispronunciation of this sound may be due to the misperception of the aspiration of this sound. - As we saw in the theoretical background, the sound /t/ is a plosive or stop consonant. - Since learners forgot that /t/ is only aspirated in initial position, so they tried to make it aspirated in all environments, thus leading to the mispronunciation of the sound. - From my experience, this error is very common among students of the English department. - Next, the mispronunciation of s to /ʃ, ʒ/ or /ʃ, ʒ/ to s seems to be related to the carelessness ɔand laziness of the students. - The students who made this kind of mistakes usually do not try to find out how the tongue act in each case, instead they make all these sounds similar which results in their mispronunciation as was found in this study. - Finally, the type of errors called “sound redundancy” seems to indicate that several learners tend to over pronounce the ending sounds, thus adding s or z at the end of any words or sometimes in the middle of the words as in the case of hobby, many pronounced it as /hɔzbi/. - d) Redundant sounds most frequently found in the data include: The most frequently redundant sounds are /z. - Unfortunately, most of the words mispronounced in our data belong to this basic stock including very frequently used words such as job, centre, the, English etc. - Conclusion We have presented the results of our study, although small but the results were fairly impressive in terms of the coverage of sounds mispronounced as well as the seriousness of errors. - Given the pronunciation problems, I would like to suggest the following remedy: a) We request that all teachers of the English department pay more attention to student’s pronunciation and try to correct them any time possible. - Tam Ha Cam, English phonetics and phonology, A course book for students of the English department, Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội, 1999