A Study Of Speech Intelligibility Of Vietnamese Students Majoring In English At The Pedagogical College Of Dalat

Abstract

This study investigates the speech intelligibility of Vietnamese students majoring in English at the Pedagogical College of Dalat. The study predicted that the students would encounter the problem of speech intelligibility and that their speech intelligibility would correlate with both dependent and independent variables. There were 314 English learners at the Pedagogical College of Dalat answering the questionnaires, 45 of whom became participants for the later diagnostic tests. Questionnaires, diagnostic tests, speech samples, and a five-point Likert scale played an important role in the process of collecting the study data. The data were then analyzed statistically and descriptively with the application of SPSS Statistics and Wavesurfer software. Based on these results, the study reached conclusions that helped to provide clearer understanding of the participants’ speech intelligibility. It was determined that more than half of the speech of the participants was unintelligible. Speech intelligibility was also influenced by the student’s genders, regional accents, years of learning English, familiarity with vocabulary, and pronunciation. The most serious problem in terms of English pronunciation errors situated at the level of English consonant clusters. Some of the participants deleted one or two final sounds in the consonant clusters; some substituted one consonant cluster for a single consonant or another consonant cluster; some inserted the schwa /ə/ in the middle of a final consonant cluster; and the others mispronounced the consonant clusters due to their inflectional endings.