Speaker
Description
This study aims to investigate the pronunciation features of EFL second year university students in a speaking course, focusing on consonant production and prosodic elements such as word stress and intonation. To demonstrate the significant difficulties that learners encountered during producing English speech, they were asked to perform both read-a-loud tasks and speaking tasks. Data from recorded speech were analyzed base on the phonological frameworks of previous research (Roach, 2009; Rogerson-Revell, 2011; Cruttenden, 2014). The findings reveal that Vietnamese learners have the tendency of omitting the final sounds such as -s and -ed, and have troubles in producing a good English intonation, affecting their communicative effectiveness. Consistent with prior research (Derwing & Munro, 2005; Yates, 2017; Pourhosein Gilakjani, 2016), the study underscores the importance of targeted pronunciation instruction, calling for further research to implement pedagogical interventions which emphasize prosodic features and final consonants to enhance students’ overall spoken proficiency.
