Major problems in pronouncing english: a case study at the University of Dalat

MAJOR PROBLEMS IN PRONOUNCING ENGLISH: A CASE STUDY 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF DALAT 
Tran Thao Uyen* 
Dalat University 
Received: 01/08/2019; Revised: 05/09/2019; Accepted: 25/12/2019 
Abstract: Seeing that pronunciation is one of the most important factors influencing learners’ speech 
intelligibility, this study investigated the sounds performed by English-majoring students at the 
University of Dalat. In an attempt to figure out main pronouncing errors as well as possible reasons for 
the students’ problems, 210 English freshmen were chosen randomly to participate in the study. The 
data collected from pronunciation tests and students’ recordings were analyzed descriptively with the 
application of Wavesurfer software version 1.8.8p5, 2013. Based on the finding results, the study 
highlighted four major pronunciation errors: the omission of final consonants, the mispronunciation of 
consonant clusters, the substitution of certain sounds, and the mispronunciation of English vowels. 
These errors were considered to originate from the learners’ lack of phonetic knowledge, the 
incompatibleness between the two languages, and a negative transference to balance with Vietnamese 
learners’ speech organs. 
Key words: Pronunciation problems, major errors, possible reasons, English-majoring students 
1. Introduction 
Obviously, English pronunciation plays a vital part in mastering the international language, 
permitting effective communication with native speakers (Roach, 1991, p. 6). However, it is not always 
easy for learners to sufficiently pronounce English words as well as avoid common mistakes. With a great 
number of books written by famous linguists such as O’Connor (1980), Kenworthy (1987), Catford (1988), 
Gimson (1989), Roach (1991), Gilbert (1993), and Baker (2006), English learners can gain general 
knowledge about phonetics and phonology, but many students still struggle with pronouncing English 
intelligibly. To solve this issue, Ruellot (2011) as well as Pearson and Da Silva (2011) discuss effective 
pedagogical methods and teaching techniques to improve learners’ pronunciation. On the other hand, Zhang 
and Yin (2009), Centerman and Krausz (2011), and Hassan (2014), in their recent articles, have paid more 
attention to major difficulties in the learning of English pronunciation. 
In Vietnam, there have been significant studies on English pronunciation pronounced by Vietnamese 
students. These pronunciation features involved vowels, consonants, consonant clusters, word stress, 
sentence stress, rhythm and intonation. Some studies analyze contrastively the differences between English 
pronunciation and Vietnamese pronunciation while the other ones highlight common errors made by 
Vietnamese students. For example, Nguyen Trong Anh Tu (1991) makes a clear contrast between English 
and Vietnamese monophthongs; Huynh Thi Ngoc Hoa and Le Minh Phu (1999) investigate common 
pronunciation mistakes in stress, linking sounds, strong and weak forms; Bui Thi Thanh Thuy (2004) 
discusses difficulties in diphthong performances of students in Quang Ngai province. Related to English 
consonants, Nguyen Thi Thanh Thanh (2006) investigates the students’ pronunciation of inflectional 
endings; Nguyen Thi Tich Hien (2006) studies final consonant sounds in Quang Nam’s high school, and 
Nguyen Thi An (2007) does a study at Tuy Hoa Industrial College about English stops. Particularly, Tran 
* Email: uyentt@dlu.edu.vn 
Thi Mong Dao (2009) conducts a study at the Pedagogical College of Dalat, analyzing the pronunciation 
errors of English vowels. Tran Thao Uyen (2017) also carries out another study to find out major problems 
related to the pronunciation of English consonant clusters performed by students majoring in English at the 
Pedagogical College of Dalat. Seeing that pronunciation is one of the most important factors influencing 
learners’ speech intelligibility, this study investigated the sounds performed by English-majoring students 
at the University of Dalat. In other words, the paper is an attempt to figure out major errors as well as 
possible reasons for the students’ problems in pronouncing English.The two research questions, therefore, 
were: 
1. What are the major pronunciation errors made by English-majoring students at Dalat University? 
2. What are the possible causes of these pronunciation errors? 
2. Theoretical framework 
2.1. Mistakes and errors 
 According to Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics by Richards et al. 
(1993), an error is made by a learner who has incomplete knowledge. A mistake, on a contrary, is made by 
a learner when writing or speaking and which is caused by lack of attention, fatigue, carelessness, or some 
other aspects of performance. According to Brown (2007, p. 257), “a mistake refers to a performance error 
that is either a random guess or a “slip”, in that it is a failure to utilize a known system correctly. Mistakes, 
when attention is called to them, can be self-corrected.” However, “an error, a noticeable deviation from 
the adult grammar of a native speaker, reflects the competence of the learner” (2007, p. 258). The author 
also notes: “The fact that learners do make errors and these errors can be observed, analyzed, and classified 
to reveal something of the system operating within the learner, led to a surge of study of learners’ errors, 
called error analysis”. Error analysis became distinguished from contrastive analysis by its examination 
of errors attributable to all possible sources, not just those resulting from negative transfer of the native 
language (2007, p. 259). 
2.2. Factors affecting pronunciation 
 Al-Saidat (2010) clarifies three factors that affect learners’ pronunciation: age, mother tongue 
influence, and personality. “The role of age is found to be more prominent in pronunciation than in other 
areas” (2010, p. 122). According to Lenneberg, as cited in Al-Saidat (2010, p. 122), there is a period of 
time when language learning is more successful than any other time in one’s life. Consequently, the author 
strongly believes that children can acquire the target language much easier than adults. Mentioning the 
impact of mother tongue, the author confirms the powerful influence of L1 on L2 pronunciation. 
Specifically, students usually find it difficult to imitate the sounds that do not exist in their own language. 
Finally, an individual’s personality somehow affects their development of pronunciation skill. It is claimed 
that confident and outgoing learners are likely more sufficient in pronunciation than those who are afraid 
to join conversations with native speakers. 
 Unlike Al-Saidat, Altamimi (2015, p. 13) points out that English pronunciation is affected by 
learners’ attitude, exposure to the target language, and teaching instruction. In terms of attitude, the author 
explains that students tend to pronounce English better if they are well aware of the English pronunciation 
and vice versa. Moreover, the more students expose to English input, the better their pronunciation will be. 
About instruction, the author believes that English teachers should give a higher priority on English 
pronunciation during classroom time. 
2.3. A contrastive analysis of English and Vietnamese sounds 
 According to Avery and Ehrlich, as cited in Altamimi (2015), mother tongue directly influences on 
learners’ abilities to pronounce English words. It means that English students have a tendency to 
mispronounce the sounds which do not exist in their original language. Kenworthy (1987, p. 4) argues that 
“the more differences there are, the more difficulties the learner will have in pronouncing English”. Hassan 
(2014, p. 32) also states that the differences in the sound systems of the two languages - L1 and L2 - have 
a profound impact on learners’ pronunciation. Zhang and Yin (2009, p. 142) comment: 
A particular sound which does not exist in the native language can therefore pose a difficulty for the second 
language learners to produce or sometimes to try to substitute those sounds with similar ones in their mother 
tongue. These sounds include both vowels and consonants. 
Certainly, Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language and each letter represents only one sound. Even 
though Vietnamese lexicon may consist of one or more syllables, it is easy to read any word from a written 
text based on its isolating syllable. English, on the other hand, is polysyllabic with many features of sound 
combinations, assimilation, rhythm, stress, and intonation. According to Avery and Ehrlich, as cited in 
Nguyen Thi Thanh Thanh (2006), the sound system of Vietnamese is absolutely different from that of 
English due to the little resemblance in sounds. More specifically, there are no consonant clusters and final 
consonants articulated in Vietnamese. Tran Thao Uyen (2017, p. 674) summarizes basic differences in terms of 
vowels and consonants between the two languages. 
Table 1. Differences in the sound systems between English and Vietnamese 
3. Methods 
3.1. Population, participants and sample size 
 As counted by the department of training management, there are 325 freshmen majoring in English at 
Faculty of Foreign Languages, Dalat University, in the academic year 2019-2020, 97 of whom are male, 
accounting for 29.8%. These students come from different cities and provinces throughout Vietnam. 
 In accordance with the study’s objectives, the sampling of the study was chosen randomly in order 
for each sample to be relatively fair. Due to the time constraint, 210 English-major freshmen were asked to 
participate in the study. All of the participants, who were between the ages of eighteen and nineteen, already 
completed 30 periods of the course named English Pronunciation Practice. With a sample size of 210 
students and 95% at confidence level, the confidence interval was 4.03. (The figures were calculated based 
on the guide in the website of  
3.2. Data collection instrument 
 The research data were collected through a pronunciation speaking test with 140 English words 
containing different vowels and consonants in English. This test was considered appropriate because it 
covered most of the sounds that the students have learned in their pronunciation course. All of 210 
participants took turns to read through 140 prepared words and their performances were recorded for later 
analysis. In order to figure out significant pronunciation errors of the participants, the software 
“Wavesurfer” (version 1.8.8p5, 2013) was used to visualize the sounds made by each participant in 
comparison with the sounds pronounced by an American native speaker who has been teaching English 
pronunciation for 11 years in Dalat city. 
4. Findings 
 The English sounds pronounced by the participants were extracted from their recordings of the 
pronunciation speaking test. The software “Wavesurfer” (version 1.8.8p5, 2013) significantly contributed 
to provide visual data for this study. After 210 participants had had their English pronunciation recorded, 
the sounds were visualized and compared with the standard sounds pronounced by Paul Olivier (Ph.D.), an 
American teacher who has been teaching English pronunciation for 11 years in Dalat city. Based on the 
differences in the visualized sounds, English-major students’ errors of pronouncing English could be 
recognized and analyzed in details. Here is an example with the word “was”. 
Figure 1. Native speaker’s pronunciation of 
“was” 
Figure 2. Students’ pronunciation of “was” 
(no final consonant) 
Figure 3. Students’ pronunciation of “was” (/ɒ/ instead of /ə/) 
(Output extracted from Wavesurfer 1.8.8p5) 
 After having visualized all tested sounds, the participants’ pronunciation errors were finally 
synchronized into four different categories as follow: 
4.1. The omission of final consonants 
 Among 210 participants, 179 freshmen making up 85.2% of the total participants had to encounter 
the challenges of final consonant which never existed in Vietnamese. /f/ as in “deaf”, /s/ as in “happiness” 
and /dʒ/ as in “age” are typical examples of this error type. 
Figure 4. Native speaker’s pronunciation of 
/dʒ/ as in “age” 
Figure 5. Students’ pronunciation of /dʒ/ as in 
“age” (no final consonant /dʒ/) 
(Otput extracted from Wavesurfer 1.8.8p5) 
 Noticeably, the word “moved” seemed to be easy but it was not pronounced correctly in the test 
because many participants omitted the final sound /d/ as illustrated in Figure 7. 
Figure 6. Native speaker’s pronunciation of /d/ 
as in “moved” 
Figure 7. Students’ pronunciation of /d/ as in 
“moved” (no final consonant /d/) 
(Output extracted from Wavesurfer 1.8.8p5) 
4.2. The mispronunciation of consonant clusters 
 In this study, 31 out of 210 freshmen (14.8% of the total participants) eliminated the first sound /g/ 
in the initial consonant cluster /gr/ of “great” and the same number of students wrongly made the cluster 
/pl/ for “player”. A great number of English-majoring students dropped the final sound of consonant 
clusters, e.g. there were 158 cases of omission of /t/ in “first”, “last” and “kept”; 179 students completely 
omitted /ts/ of the cluster /nts/ in “instruments”. 
Figure 8. Native speaker’s pronunciation of /pl/ as 
in “player” 
Figure 9. Students’ pronunciation of /pl/ as in 
“player” (/f/ instead of /pl/) 
 (Output extracted from Wavesurfer 1.8.8p5) 
Figure 10. Native speaker’s pronunciation of /ts/ as 
in “instruments” 
Figure 11. Students’ pronunciation of /ts/ as in 
“instruments” (no consonant cluster /ts/) 
Figure 12. Students’ pronunciation of /ts/ as in “instruments” (no final consonant /s/) 
(Output extracted from Wavesurfer 1.8.8p5) 
4.3. The substitution of certain sounds 
Again, the word “moved” was pronounced incorrectly because there were 43 out of 210 participants 
substituting the consonant cluster /fd/ for /vd/ as illustrated in Figure 13. 
Figure 6. Native speaker’s pronunciation of /d/ as in 
“moved” 
Figure 13. Students’ pronunciation of /d/ as 
in “moved” (/f/ instead of /vd/) 
(Output extracted from Wavesurfer 1.8.8p5) 
The sound /dʒ / as in “Germany”, for instance, was changed into /g/ and /tʃ/ by 83 and 191 participants 
respectively. Similarly, 58 out of 210 participants replaced the sounds /ð/ as in “other”, becoming /d/ 
instead; 135 out of 210 participants substituted /tw/ for /tʃ/when pronouncing the word “twelve”. Besides, 
the palatal /ʃ/ as in “shall” was replaced with the alveolar /s/ by 144 participants. 
4.5. The mispronunciation of English vowels 
 In terms of vowel pronunciation, the vowel /u: / as in “soon” was mispronounced as /sɒn/ by 46 out 
of 210 participants. The word “opera” was also mispronounced as /ɔ:perɑ:/ instead of /'ɒprə/. The two 
figures below showed a difference between native pronunciation and Vietnamese pronunciation for the 
word “opera”. 
Figure 14. Native speaker’s pronunciation of 
“opera” 
Figure 15. Students’ pronunciation of 
“opera” (wrong vowels) 
(Output extracted from Wavesurfer 1.8.8p5) 
5. Discussion and implications 
With the descriptive analysis in this qualitative study, it could then come up to the conclusion about 
possible reasons for learners’ pronunciation errors. Firstly, the above errors originated from learners’ lack 
of phonetic knowledge. Because all of the participants were freshmen who hardly studied English Phonetics 
and Phonology at high schools, they had no idea of the speech organs with articulators, air stream, vocal 
vibration, and aspiration. As Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams (2007) state in their book, English vowels are 
classified according to four criteria: tongue position, tongue height, lip rounding, and tenseness (pp. 236-
240). However, freshmen were unfamiliar with these linguistic terms. Subsequently, there were vowels that 
seemed undoubtedly tough for them to pronounce, leading to cases of vowel mispronunciation in this study. 
Secondly, unavoidable errors happened due to the incompatibleness between the two languages. Because 
some of the English sounds such as /θ/, /ð/, /ʒ/, /dʒ/ have no exact equivalents in Vietnamese, they were 
really difficult for the participants to make the correct sounds. Hence, many participants tended to replace 
the difficult sounds with what they were much more accustomed to. Moreover, in Vietnamese, there rarely 
exist two or three consonants combining together to create a cluster, resulting in a fact that the English-
major freshmen at Dalat University hardly used to pronounce complex consonant clusters. Finally, the 
errors were caused by a negative transference to balance with Vietnamese learners’ speech organs. As 
commented by Ehrlich and Avery (1992), the mispronunciations of words by non-native speakers reflect 
the influence of the sounds, rules, stress, and intonation of their native language. Although Vietnamese and 
English share similarities in sound segments and spelling, the way native speakers pronounce English 
sounds is completely different from the Vietnamese way. Consequently, language learners usually had 
problems with the movements of their tongue towards the articulators due to the deeply rooted way of 
pronouncing Vietnamese words. Therefore, a great number of participants would prefer to ignore some 
difficult sounds rather than try to pronounce them in a correct manner. 
 No matter how generalized the study tried to be, there were some certain limitations. First, the study 
samples should have been more various in terms of ages and language levels as the study participants were 
only freshmen. Second, when the participants got their pronunciation tests recorded, they just approached 
the pronunciation course for only 30 periods, which was considered rather limited. Third, the pronunciation 
tests were still at word level and the words were out of real contexts of applying the language into oral 
communication. Finally, it was not enough satisfactory to pose the errors of pronunciation without 
suggesting any solutions to improve students’ pronunciation of English. Thus, it is necessary to conduct 
another study in this area for the purpose of recommending useful programs and strategies for English-
majoring students at Dalat University to enhance their English pronunciation. 
6. Conclusion 
 English pronunciation is clearly a challenge for students majoring in English at the University of 
Dalat. On average, over two thirds of the participants taking part in the study were not successful in correctly 
pronouncing words containing English vowels and consonants. Four remarkable errors were the omission 
of final consonants, the mispronunciation of consonant clusters, the substitution of certain sounds, and the 
mispronunciation of English vowels. Significantly, the errors were considered to originate from the 
learners’ lack of phonetic knowledge, the incompatibleness between the two languages and a negative 
transference to balance with Vietnamese learners’ speech organs. Although the research topic is not new-
fangled, this study could systematically and clearly point out important errors in the pronunciation of 
English-majoring students. Therefore, this research paper could give reliable foundation for the following 
studies focusing on effective methods to improve students’ pronunciation. 
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