An investigation into the common errors in pronouncing word-final consonants “s”, “z”, “t” faced by six year-old students at Phu Xuyen primary school

• Main Author: Lê, Phương Lan
• Other Authors: Phạm, Thị Thanh Thùy
• Published: University of Languages and International Studies 2017
• Subjects: Ngôn ngữ; Lỗi phát âm; Trường tiểu học Phú Xuyên
• Online Access: http://repository.vnu.edu.vn/handle/VNU_123/41064
• Institution: Vietnam National University, Hanoi

Being a teacher, an observer and researcher of Grade 1 classes at Phu Xuyen primary school for the whole school - year since 2012, seeing a lot of mispronunciation errors happened, the researcher must conduct this case study research as a matter of urgency to help students to overcome these errors from the early school. Two classes with 35 students naturally participated in the study through three experimental recording tasks and the basic questionnaire in Vietnamese. The quantitative data gathered will provide readers with many reliable results relating to most problematic ending consonant sounds, the common errors in pronouncing these sounds, the causes as well the possible solutions to deal with such errors. The results reveal the f ollowing concerning information. Firstly, most of the subjects of the study struggle many difficulties in pronouncing the ending sound consonants /s/, /z/, /t/. Secondly, the most common errors were sound omitted, sound confusion and sound redundancy. The causes leading to such errors were mainly the direct imitation of the teacher or friends‟ sounds, the lack of detailed instruction on the pronunciation of isolated consonant sounds and the students‟ laziness. To help students pronounce more correctly, some strategies are being appl ied effectively such as the media/ software with the standard pronunciation of the native for students to listen and read aloud, encouraging students to ask for help from others and requiring students to practice as much as possib le. With limitations of the minor thesis, it is hoped that the study will be useful for other teachers or researchers with the passion for improving students‟ pronunciation, especially pronunciation with the word - final consonant sounds.