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Why is pronunciation such a problematic section of the English language to learn for Vietnamese students? The Vietnamese language, like many other languages, has a different sound system that the English language has in its phonetics. A common problem with learning a new language comes with the presence of the learners' native language and how it influences the listening and speaking aspects of the language in interest. Surveys and studies show that the majority of Vietnamese students had the most difficulty with pronunciation than any other area of the English language; this is due to the absence of tenses, complex lax vowels, a variety of differences in dialect, consonant positions, stresses, and tones. Problems with vowels between the two languages are not easy to teach. The very complex Vietnamese vowel system contains eleven pure vowels, those vowels are as follows: /a/, /ă/, /â/, /o/, /ô/, /ơ/, /e/, /ê/, /u/, /ư/, and /i/. Most of these vowels are free of position while some are not. There are many similarities between the English vowel system and the Vietnamese vowel system. The Vietnamese system carries alternatives to the pure closest vowel when articulating the pure vowel in English, such as me/mê/ for 'may' and lo /lô/ for 'low'; some pairs of Vietnamese diphthongs can only distinguish this by the length of the constituent vowels. By replacing and pronouncing English in that way, many problems arise for Vietnamese students with difficulty in pronunciation. The Vowel selection that confuses students is between the tense and lax vowels in English. For Vietnamese speakers, it is hard to pronounce the two vowels of each pair correctly. With this failure to pronounce the two vowels of each pair correctly, it leads to confusion and errors with pronouncing English words. Another problem that a lot of Vietnamese students face is the consonant system between the two languages. In Vietnamese, there are consonants but tend to be abrupt and short, almost as if they were silent. While in English, they are more enunciated, this is not the case in the Vietnamese language. Most Vietnamese speakers can pronounce words with voiceless stop consonants, but with most Vietnamese words with voiceless stop consonants such as /p/, /t/ and, /k/, they occur at the final position of a word in Vietnamese. With the short duration of these consonants, the sounds are never released at the end of a word and can be difficult for students to adjust to using more pronounced consonants. Students will often skip consonants in their speech with words like ‘seat’; it may sound like ‘see’ because of the absence pronunciation of the consonant /t/. While on the topic of voiced/voiceless stops, another common pronunciation problem is with the stops at the end of words as within the Vietnamese language, there are none. Some learners of English find words with the stops such as /b/, /p/, /d/, and /g/ very strenuous to pronounce. Additionally, Vietnamese learners also find words with final fricative consonants hard to produce because fricatives do not occur in the final position of words. However, with words beginning with fricative sounds such as /f/, /v/, and /s/, it is far more comfortable for the learner to pronounce. For example, the word ‘beef’, maybe pronounced like /bi:/. With practice, this can be resolved with drilling exercises and verbal demonstrations. There are many more problems that can appear with pronunciation with teaching the English language. Though it is not easy to correct and teach the right articulation and sounds, pronunciation will be an obstacle for most students to overcome when learning English with its more complex system of consonants, vowels, tenses, and many more compared to the Vietnamese language. These were just a few listed above.
