tailieunhanh - Báo cáo " Common pronunciation problems of vietnamese learners of english "

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. | COMMON PRONUNCIATION PROBLEMS OF VIETNAMESE LEARNERS OF ENGLISH Ha Cam Tam 1. 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. As a result the English curriculum has been geared more toward communication. Most people hoped that with communicative teaching oriented syllabus students would be much improved in oral communication. But it turns out that this is not true since we have noticed learners with serious pronunciation errors which results in their communication breakdown. Hinofitis and Baily 1980 pp. 124-125 reported that up to a certain proficiency standard the fault which most severely impairs the communication process in EFL ESL learners is pronunciation rather than vocabulary or grammar. Their arguments make pronunciation more important in improving the communicative competence of learners. According to Davenport and Hannahs 1998 humans have a variety of ways of producing sounds not all of which are relevant to language example coughing burping etc. . Sound is significant because it is used as part of a code of a particular language. So we can talk about the distinctive sounds of English French Vietnamese and other languages. In this sense we can talk about pronunciation as the production and reception of sounds of speech. In addition sound is significant because it is used to achieve meaning in contexts of use. Here the code combines with other factors to make .