Selected Pronunciation Issues of South Vietnamese English

Abstract

In the process of English language acquisition by Vietnamese learners, speaking skills and pronunciation, in particular, tend to be the competencies most arduous to acquire. We assume that learners’ weaknesses in speaking performance might be partially conditioned by the lack of confidence to express oneself verbally due to pronunciation difficulties. The objective of our article is to describe selected pronunciation issues of South Vietnamese speakers of English that we identified in our preliminary research in the form of a case study carried out on the students at the English Department of the Hong Bang International University in Ho Chi Minh City. We described the case study in great detail in the article by Slówik & Doan published in Vietnamese. Our task here was to utilize the findings of our case study and confirm whether it is possible to support our conclusions using data from computer speech analysis with the help of the software PRAAT. In order to do so, we had to compose a sub-corpus of 6 speakers of South Vietnamese English (3 males, 3 females, all in their early 20 s and born in Ho Chi Minh City). The results discussed in this article can be utilized for the purposes of applied linguistics or ELT education when working with (South) Vietnamese learners.