1 PART 1: INTRODUCTION This part, which is an introduction to the thesis, helps to provide the background as well as the context for the present study. The section includes the statement of the problem and rationale for the study, research questions, aims and objectives, significance, scope of the study and an overview of the rest of the paper. 1. Problem statement and rationale for the study Since the first characteristic of “being able to function in a language is the ability to speak that language” (Nunan, 1999, p. 225), English learners will lend themselves naturally to the study of English pronunciation. Garrigues (1999) pointed out that good pronunciation is the foundation of effective spoken communication. If speakers pronounce clearly and correctly, their audience interlocutors should be able to understand what they are trying to express easily. On the other hand, misunderstanding, in many cases, may occur when words are inaccurately pronounced or stressed. As it can affect accuracy and comprehension, pronunciation is drawing more attention in many ESL/EFL classrooms. However, ESL/EFL learners encounter some common difficulties when learning second/foreign language pronunciation. According to Kenworthy (1987), the factors affecting students’ acquisition of pronunciation can be the native language, the age factor, the amount of exposure, phonetic ability, attitude and identity, motivation and concern for good pronunciation and the teacher’s role. Among those, several factors such as the age factor and the phonetic ability can hardly be intervened during the learning process at the tertiary level whereas the rest of which can be mediated with the help of the teacher. As for Vietnamese learners, among the listed factors, the differences between Vietnamese and English segmental and suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation pose many difficulties. Ha’s study (2005) has revealed that the most common pronunciation problems among Vietnamese learners are concerned with English consonants. From my teaching experience with both 2 English majors and non-English majors, it was apparent that poor pronunciation ability, particularly inaccurate consonant sounds, prevented many students from being understood by their teachers, friends and native speakers in oral communication. As a result, most of them had little confidence in the classroom when it came to a speaking task. In other words, of the factors contributing to students’ reluctance to speak English in class, the fear of making pronunciation mistakes governed. Acknowledging the importance of improving students’ pronunciation ability, the College of Technology - VNU has developed the English program that separates pronunciation training from other language skills. In this program, pronunciation training with the use of the textbook “Ship or Sheep” (Baker, 1992) takes up to 1.5 hours a week. However, although official training had been provided with quite plenty of time allocation, the teaching and learning of pronunciation in this program still faced many challenges. The first problem is that students did not have appropriate methods towards their learning of pronunciation. They were passive, unconfident learners in the classroom, following teacher’s guidance when it came to pronunciation practice. Also, they blamed their low pronunciation competence for the lack of resources, learning strategies and motivation to practice at home. Another challenge may lie in the pronunciation program itself. The lessons with the course book “Ship or Sheep” may inhibit the students’ motivation to learn pronunciation with the repetition of the task types and learning activities. From these problems, there are two questions that arise in my mind: i) how can students be assisted in their learning approach to improve their pronunciation? and ii) how can a teacher make the best use of the teaching time to help the students become more involved in their own learning and more confident in their oral communication? First of all, how can students be assisted in their learning approach to achieve better pronunciation? The communicative approach to pronunciation teaching requires teaching methods and objectives that include whole-person learner involvement (Morley, 1991). Morley stated that there are three important dimensions the teacher should cater for in any pronunciation program: the learner's intellectual involvement, affective involvement, and physical involvement. The learner's involvement in the learning process has been noted as one 3 of the best techniques for developing learner strategies (Morley, 1991). It is, therefore, the teacher's responsibility to develop the learning process so that the learner has the greatest chance to develop the learning strategies that are unique to each individual. Vitanova & Miller (2002) believed that once learners have mastered the basic sounds of English, it is time to help them learn some strategies so that they can study more effectively on their own. However, most of the research in the field of learning strategy instruction has focused on reading as one of the important language skills (Carrell, 1998), and on cognitive strategies as one of the main categories of learning strategies but little attention was paid to pronunciation and metacognitive strategies, particularly the relationship between these two. Metacognitive strategies, according to O’Malley and Chamot (1990), include selective attention to the task, planning, self-monitoring, and self-evaluating. The importance of metacognitive strategies has been emphasized by O'Malley et al. (1985, p.561) by stating that "students without metacognitive approaches are essentially learners without direction or opportunity to review their progress, accomplishment, and future directions". According to Anderson (2002b), developing metacognitive awareness in learners may also lead to the development of stronger cognitive skills and much deeper processing. It results in critical but healthy reflection and evaluation of thinking. Therefore, in order to seek answers to the first question proposed above, the present study focuses on explicit metacognitive strategy instruction and its impact on pronunciation improvement of the students. In answering the second question, to help learners become more involved in their own learning of pronunciation, to become confident speakers of the language and to reduce the one-to-one interaction between teachers and students in pronunciation lessons, peer tutoring is advocated. Peer tutoring is defined as the process that “involves students learning from and with each other in ways which are mutually beneficial” (Boud, Cohen and Sampson's, 2001, p. 1). One reason for the use of peer tutoring in second language teaching is that firstly, the participants seem quite capable of successfully learning with each other and secondly, they can benefit socially from the experience (Cohen et al., 1982; Greenwood et al., 1998). Additional evidence (King et al., 1998) indicates that peer tutoring may also encourage 4 students to engage in metacognitive self-monitoring, which helps learners to detect and repair missing knowledge and misconceptions. Although there are many methods and teaching materials to improve the pronunciation learning and teaching, there appears to be no publication investigating the effectiveness of using metacognitive strategies in pronunciation training as well as no advocate for the use of peer-tutoring activities to encourage students’ confidence in oral communication. Therefore, this study aims to develop a research program which combines these two variables to improve students’ pronunciation. Arguments for adopting metacognitive strategy training and using peer tutoring in teaching English consonants can be found in details in Methodology chapter (3.3). 2. Aims and objectives of the study Specifically, the study aims to: i) investigate the teaching of English pronunciation and demonstrate the importance of metacognitive strategy training to see how it can develop learners’ ability to take charge of their own learning. ii) evaluate the effectiveness of peer tutoring in the form of a pronunciation assignment and see if, to what extent it helps to build up the students’ speaking confidence. iii) find out whether students’ overall pronunciation competence is improved after such practices as metacognitive strategy training and peer tutoring assignment are adopted or not. 3. Research questions Based on the purposes of the study, the researcher attempted to develop a program particularly for improving students’ pronunciation of consonant sounds. This investigation was designed to answer the following questions: 5 1. What metacognitive strategies were employed by the students in their self-learning? 2. Can peer-tutoring assignment help to develop students’ speaking confidence? 3. Is there a significant difference in students’ pronunciation after metacognitive strategy training and peer tutoring assignment? 4. Scope of the study The research was conducted on a group of 15 students in the Collaboration Program of College of Technology. Regarding its scope, the study only aimed at using metacognitive strategy training and peer tutoring to improve students’ oral communication with reference to segmental aspects of pronunciation. Particularly, the study investigated the effects of the intervention on students’ pronunciation of consonant sounds. Vowel sounds, although appeared in the practice of some tactics of metacognitive strategies throughout the research, were not the focus of this study. In addition, the study only takes the definition of reciprocal peer tutoring developed by Fantuzzo and his associates (Fantuzzo, King, & Heller, 1992) into consideration. Reciprocal peer tutoring refers to the type of tutoring which enables students to function reciprocally as both tutors and tutees. Other types of peer tutoring will be described in the literature review chapter only to underline the significance of reciprocal peer tutoring. 5. Methods of the study The research design employed in this study is action research, with the use of a number of instruments, namely, pretest and posttests, field notes, reflective reports and discussion. The combination of different instruments used in this research would help to gain reliable data and help the researcher have a close investigation into the problems that the students were having. Rationale for the choice of action research and the use of mixed methods in data collection are presented in Methodology chapter. 6 6. Importance of the study The present research was carried out with the hope that ESL/EFL teachers will find out: i) the importance of teaching pronunciation with an emphasis on metacognitive strategy training and ii) the applicability of a peer-tutoring assignment in pronunciation to improve students’ confidence while communicating in English. My further target is that there will be changes in the teachers’ perception of pronunciation teaching and learning and then a change in their approach to pronunciation teaching and practice in the classroom, particularly to the pre-intermediate and lower students. 7. Design of the study The following parts of the study were divided into five chapters: PART 2: Development Chapter 1: Literature Review This chapter reviews the current theories in pronunciation teaching and learning, the classifications of language learning strategies, types of peer tutoring and the justification why this study fits in the research area. Chapter 2: Methodology The Methodology chapter explains why action research was chosen as the research method, presents the arguments for using metacognitive strategy training and peer tutoring as the research variables, shows the steps of how the research was conducted, justifies data collection instruments and data analysis methods. Chapter 3: Findings and discussion In chapter 3, the actions, findings and analysis of the findings in Cycle 1 and Cycle 2 of the research are provided in response to the research questions. 7 Chapter 4: Implications This chapter attempts to link the research results and discussed issues in the previous chapter to the real-life second teaching and learning of pronunciation. This chapter suggests the framework of teaching segmental aspects of pronunciation with the use of learning strategies and pronunciation assignment to promote learners’ confidence in speaking English PART 3: Conclusion This part summarizes the findings of the action research, acknowledges the limitations and offers suggestions for further research. 8 PART 2: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW Introduction In this chapter, the study aims to provide the concepts occurring in the subject matter and review the theories and findings of the related studies in the research area. The chapter is divided into six main parts: 1) pronunciation teaching and learning; 2) common pronunciation problems among Vietnamese learners; 3) language learning strategies; 4) pronunciation learning strategies; 5) learning strategy training and 6) peer tutoring. 1.1. Pronunciation teaching and learning 1.1.1. The importance of pronunciation teaching and learning Many researchers agreed that only until recently, pronunciation teaching has been labeled “the Cinderella of TESOL” (Kelly, 1969; Dalton, 1997). In traditional ways of learning English, students often neglected the basic knowledge of speaking which includes the highlighted importance of pronunciation. However, in communicative approach, Morley (1998) states that pronunciation plays an important role in overall communicative competence and therefore pronunciation teaching is an essential part of any course designed. Under this approach, students are not required to have a native-like pronunciation, but intelligible one. This is a kind of “accepted pronunciation”, which means students may make some mistakes but they do not affect negatively on the comprehension of the listeners or cause misunderstanding. Though Krashen’s (1985) position was that pronunciation is acquired naturally, pronunciation teaching and learning in this study, however, follow Smith’s arguments (1981) that consciousness and awareness raising are important in second language acquisition. Furthermore, clear instruction was important to the effectiveness of pronunciation training (Spada 1997, Pennington 1998 cited in Varasarin, 2007). These scholars also found that both instruction in segmental accuracy and instruction in general speaking habits and prosodic features, led to improved pronunciation. Others believe that teaching can play an important 9 role in helping learners develop ways of improving their pronunciation and shaping their attitude toward the importance of pronunciation (Richards & Renandya, 2002 cited in Varasarin, 2007). Fraser (1999, cited in Varasarin, 2007) concluded that most ESL teachers agree that confidence with pronunciation allows learners to communicate more successfully in the target language. 1.1.2. The acquisition of pronunciation A number of studies have attempted to identify the factors that affect second/foreign language students’ acquisition of pronunciation. Kenworthy (1987) has summarized these factors in his book: • The native language This is proved to be the most influential factor affecting a students’ pronunciation. If the students are familiar with the sound system of their native language, they will be influenced enormously when they learn a second language. Therefore, a “foreign accent” which refers to people with an accent of their native language can be easily identified among speakers of English. It is known to many people that there exist the so-called Australia English, Singaporean English, Vietnamese English, Indian English as the influence of the mother tongue on the learning of English accent. • The age factor Although it is often assumed that younger learners could learn to pronounce the second language better than older ones, according to Kenworthy (1987), age is not the crucial factor that affects learning or improving pronunciation abilities Brown (1992) presented that adults were probably able to learn second language phonology as well as children did, in a direct way, using a traditional listen-and-repeat exercise, minimal pairs in the context of the sentences, conversation and role playing. However, there was no evidence for a simple and straightforward link between age and ability in pronunciation of a new language. The fact is that both younger learners and adults can improve their pronunciation abilities. 10 • Amount of exposure According to Brown (1992), it seemed that the amount of exposure is a contributing factor but not a necessary factor for the development of pronunciation skill. He concluded that people living in English-speaking countries have better pronunciation accuracy than those who did not. However, it is hard to measure the amount of exposure to a language. A person living in an English-speaking country but not using it in everyday life may not have more time using English than another person living in a non-English speaking country but using it at work. Therefore, there is doubt that the amount of exposure is an important contribution to pronunciation accuracy. • The phonetic ability It is a common view that some people have a ‘better ear’ for a foreign language than others. This skill is sometimes called ‘phonetic coding ability’ (Brown, 1992). Although students may have attuned to phonetic discrimination as children, it does not mean that teachers cannot do anything to help. Some studies have suggested that some elements of learning are a matter of awareness of the different sounds. Therefore, pronunciation can improve with effort and concentration on those sounds. • The attitude and identity Brown (1992) pointed out that another influence was one’s attitude toward speakers of the target language and the extent to which the language ego identified with those speakers. Results from many studies have shown that learners who have a positive attitude towards speakers of a foreign language tend to have a more native-like pronunciation. This is due to the fact that when people like something, they are more likely to pay more attention to it. They were not afraid of the second identity that may have been emerging within them. On the contrary, some students are also aware of their foreign accent and do not attempt to sound like native speakers as they want to be identified as the second language learners. • The motivation and concern for good pronunciation