An Investigation into Difficulties in Teaching Pronunciation to First-Year English Majors at Dong Nai University

Abstract

This paper aims to find out the difficulties the teachers of English at Dong Nai University (DNU) meet when teaching pronunciation to first-year English majors. The participants of the study are the students and the teachers from the Department of foreign languages of DNU. The main research tool is a questionnaire survey. Eight teachers and sixty students from three classes respond to the survey. The findings show that the teachers find it difficult to teach students with poor phonetic ability, with pronunciation problems of English consonants, stress and intonation. Furthermore, teachers have trouble with being reluctant to improve the pronunciation of their students. Difficulties arising from physical conditions such as classroom’s facilities, class size, and mixed ability are the teachers’ problems when teaching pronunciation. Some suggestions to minimize the difficulties of pronunciation teaching faced by the teachers are also given in the paper.