An Inquiry into the Impact of the Mother Tongue on Vietnamese Adult EFL Learners’ Speech Intelligibility with Reference to Syllable Structure

Abstract

This thesis seeks to investigate how the mother tongue of 50 Vietnamese university EFL students impacts on their intelligibility in oral communication, with specific reference to syllable structure. The assumption is that there is interference between the native language (L1) and the new language (L2), and negative transfer of native oral usage habits to the target language, which affects the students’ intelligibility. Additionally, the current study also examines other potential reasons for the participating students having pronunciation errors. Mixed methods for data collection and analysis – a quantitative approach and a qualitative approach – have been used to explore these issues. The quantitative data and results provide the general picture of the research problem, whereas further analysis and rich data gained through qualitative data collection have refined, extended, and explained the intelligibility problem of Vietnamese English speakers in depth. The findings show that Vietnamese adult EFL speakers’ intelligibility is so low and that syllable structure errors impact on the students’ speech intelligibility. The syllable structure errors are generally caused by the application of Vietnamese syllable structure in the pronunciation of English syllables in the pronunciation tests. For instance, Vietnamese open syllables were used by the 50 informants to articulate English close syllables during the pronunciation tests.