Teaching English Sounds to Vietnamese Secondary School Students: From Theories to Applications Using Learner-centered Methods

Abstract

Pronunciation plays a pivotal role in language teaching for communicative purposes. Practitioners, however, are either ignorant or reluctant to teach pronunciation due to insufficient professional training, time restrictions, large classrooms, and excessive language knowledge. This research was conducted to fill this gap. The author carefully synthesized theories of language and second language (L2) learning to design a series of activities for teaching English pronunciation to Vietnamese secondary school students with the use of learner-centered methods. Sixteen pronunciation lessons on sounds from English 6 i-Learn Smart World (Vo et al., 2021) and English 7 i-Learn Smart World (Vo et al., 2022) were examined. The findings recommended some activities which were based on the pronunciation acquisition of meaning, form, and use and followed the Pre-While-Post teaching procedure. The pedagogical issues mentioned will be resolved in similar educational settings when this effort succeeds in developing a basic theory-based procedure to teach English sounds.