The current state of pronunciation instruction and

learning in Vietnam in general and in English

department (VCU) in particular
Ha Thi Vu Ha, M.A.
In many countries, when teaching and learning English is mentioned, people often think
about the four familiar macro skills which are listening, speaking, reading and writing, and
curriculum is often designed with the hope that students can gain as much knowledge about
English language as possible and optimize their performances in the four English skills.
However, when it comes to teaching speaking in general and pronunciation in particular,
many difficulties arise; for example, because of the tight curriculum, it may be hard for
teachers to find enough time to address pronunciation, and even if they have time, the
pronunciation instruction may still be uninteresting and discouraging to students, as agreed
by Gilbert (2008, p. 1). This situation can happen everywhere, and the English faculty at
Vietnam University of Commerce (VCU) is not an exception, with which I strongly agree
as both an English teacher and learner. In the scope of this essay, the current state of
pronunciation instruction in Vietnam today in general and in the English faculty of VCU in
particular will be explored so that some insight into it can be gained.
The current situation
To begin with, pronunciation studying and instruction has not been given sufficient time in
the curriculum. Students of the English Faculty who works with The Business PreIntermediate, Intermediate and Upper-Intermediate are often overwhelmed with various
sections in one single lesson including grammar exercises, reading and listening practices
and so on and pronunciation section often amounts to boring repetition of what the teachers
say and the tight schedule does not allow the have time for individuals pronunciation to be
corrected by the teachers. Moreover, each pronunciation section often focuses on individual
elements of pronunciation without integrating them with each other. In other words,
pronunciation is not studied in the way that ESL learners can integrate the sound-system

components they are learning (Dickerson 2010, p. 11). For example, one lesson may focus
on vowels, another one may focus on consonants, and word stress may be addressed
several weeks later. This makes students wonder how all of them relate to each other and
tend to forget everything right after they leave the classroom. This is also described by
Dickerson (2010, p. 12) as a jam which means the situation in which a phenomenon in
phonology cannot be fully and satisfactorily described without referring to other
phenomena that have not yet been introduced, for instance, teaching the Schwa sound
without teaching its rhythmic context to show that it is unstressed. Thus, the teaching and
learning of the subsystems of phonology including the segmentals (consonant phonemes,
vowel phonemes, spelling, etc.) and suprasegmentals (word stress, phrase rhythm,
intonation, etc.) should be built on each other and interlock to each other so that this kind of
jam can be avoided.
One thing to notice is that when speaking English, Vietnamese students in general and
students of the English Faculty in VCU in particular often have difficulties in making their
interlocutors recognize the most important information they want to address in one
utterance because their speeches are affected by the intonation of Vietnamese which is
difference from that of English. Therefore, the Prosody Pyramid that Gilbert (2008, p. 10)
described is a useful approach to teach pronunciation in Vietnam because it helps students
identify the thought group, focus word, stress and peak that they should have in one
utterance. For example, thought groups generally start on a higher pitch and then drop at
the end (Gilbert 2008, p. 11) or the focus word should be emphasized because it is the
word that the speaker wants the listener to notice (Gilbert 2008, p. 12). Based on those
explanations, students can apply useful signals to make their utterances more intelligible.
Besides, a lot of students in our faculty still find it hard to distinguish between l and n
sound. This situation can be improved by doing tongue twister exercises but if the students
do not keep the habit of practicing everyday and continue to speak Vietnamese with the
confusion of the l and n sound, they will not be able to fix their wrong English
pronunciation. For example, it is horrible to hear someone say My lame is A instead of
My name is A.

The desire to sound native like a brand new hope

Intelligibility was also emphasized in the article written by Jenkins (2002), which arouses
many thoughts about the situation in my faculty. The EIL (English as an International
Language) model that was addressed throughout the article arose from the shift in the use
of English in which non-native speakers outnumber native speakers (Jenkins 2002, p. 83)
and therefore implies pronunciation syllabus for EIL. Although this new approach seems to
suit the situation in Vietnam in which it may be enough for students to make themselves
intelligible in conversations with each other and even with non-native English speakers
from other countries, the students desire to sound native-like is still too strong and needs
to be met with the help of teachers. This desire also plays the role of a motivation in their
daily study and exploration of English-speaking countries cultures. Therefore, although
there are a great number of students in our faculty are still satisfied with the fact that their
interlocutors understand what they mean in general, a lot of other students are now
focusing on improving their pronunciation on order to sound native-like.
Creative methods in teaching and learning pronunciation
Another fact existing in the pronunciation study of the students in our faculty is that the
methods that for a long period of time, they have been thinking that the methods teachers
use are not engaging and diversified enough to attract them and generate their interest.
Even now when they are already English major students who have experienced more
creative ways of teaching pronunciation given by our facultys lecturers, they are still
obsessed with the methods their teachers used in the past which were drilling sounds over
and over again and trying to make students remember the pronunciation of individual
words in each lesson by providing the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols of the
words. Although it is undeniable that this method makes it easier for students to know how
new words are pronounced when looking them up in the dictionary, it may also make
students depend on dictionaries and find pronunciation learning tedious and difficult to
remember. Therefore, I find the new approach in teaching and learning English
pronunciation addressed by Acton (2011) in his manual very interesting and feasible to
apply to my countrys case. The EHIEP (Essential Haptically-Integrated English
Pronunciation) system described in his manual is a multiple-modality one that makes
3

pronunciation learning and teaching become more engaging to students thanks to the
extensive use of vivid body movement and touch learned from the videos, in other words,
the kinaesthetic method which is suitable for all levels of learners and any classroom sizes.
Besides, the main technical requirement is a TV for students to see the video which is
affordable in most schools in Vietnam. At VCU, we even have a projector in every
classroom, which makes it even easier to do.
For example, to practice sentence stress, teachers can divide students into different pairs.
The teacher will then give each pair a script of a dialogue in which the words receiving
sentence stress are underlined. Whenever it comes to those words, each student must touch
the arm of the other student in the pair. The touch may be strong or weak depending on
how important the words are in the students opinion. For example, among the underlined
words in a sentence, the word which the students consider as the word playing the biggest
role in creating meaning of the sentence will be associated with the strongest tap of the
shouder. After the pairs have practiced this, the teacher will give them the answers of the
most important words in a sentence for the students to check whether they have done it
correctly or not. The students will then have time to practice everything again. The same
practice may be applied to studying word stress.
The use of multiple modalities makes pronunciation teaching and learning more fascinating
to students in many ways. It helps break the preconception that the pronunciation learning
process may just be a boring routine of drilling sounds, note-taking the IPA symbols and
learning them by heart because with multiple modalities, students can remember different
pronunciation aspects by associating them with body movements. It is also designed so that
learners from any countries and with any learning styles can follow easily, as agreed by
Acton (2011). Furthermore, when pronunciation exercises are associated with body
movement, they can become more memorable because certain movements pertain to
certain sounds. Another reason that contributes to the usefulness of multiple modalities is
that because the activities can be done as a whole class, students can follow more
comfortably while having fun with each other. This helps create good class atmosphere
which is very important to teaching and learning pronunciation. The students are happy and
they will be more willing to learn.

Although pronunciation instruction still poses many challenges to teachers and students in
many countries in general and my country Vietnam in particular, I believe that with the
help of various research works in this field as well as the endless efforts of both teachers
and learners, those challenges can be overcome. Hopefully, the idea of teaching
pronunciation will not intimidate teachers as stated by Burgess & Spencer (2000), cited in
Derwing (2010, p. 24) and pronunciation will no longer be described as the orphan of
second language research and teaching (Derwing & Munro 2005, cited in Derwing (2010,
p. 24).

References

Acton, B 2011, Essential, Haptically-Intergrated English Pronunciation, Trinity Western

University, accessed 26/07/2012, Janison UOW.

Derwing, TM 2010, Utopian Goals for Pronunciation Teaching, in JM Levis & K LeVelle
(Eds.), Proceedings of the 1st Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and
Teaching Conference, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, pp. 10-23.

Dickerson, WB 2010, Walking the walk: Integrating the story of English phonology, in
JM Levis & K LeVelle (Eds.), Proceedings of the 1st Pronunciation in Second
Language Learning and Teaching Conference, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, pp.
24-37.

Gilbert, J 2008, Teaching Pronunciation: Using the Prosody Pyramid, Cambridge

University Press, New York.

Jenkins, J 2002, A Sociolinguistically Based, Empirically Researched Pronunciation

Syllabus for English as an International Language, Applied Linguistics, vol. 13, no.
1, pp. 83-103.