HUẤN LUYỆN CHIẾN lược SIÊU NHẬN THỨC và sử DỤNG HOẠT ĐỘNG PHỤ đạo NHẰM NÂNG CAO kỹ NĂNG GIAO TIẾP

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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

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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

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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

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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