









































citation


AsiaCALL Online Journal Received: 14/10/2021 

ISSN 1936-9859; https://asiacall.info/acoj Revision: 24/10/2021 

Vol. 12; No. 5; 2021  Accepted: 26/10/2021 

pp. 129-136  Online: 26/10/2021 

 CITATION | Nguyen, T. G. M. (2021). Some Common Ways for Students to Improve Pronunciation during Covid-

19 Pandemic. AsiaCALL Online Journal, 12(5), 129-136. EOI: http://eoi.citefactor.org/10.11251/acoj.12.05.009. 

 

Some Common Ways for Students to Improve Pronunciation during Covid-19 

Pandemic 

Nguyen Truong Gia Minh 

Hoa Sen University, Vietnam 

Correspondence: Nguyen Truong Gia Minh, Hoa Sen University, Vietnam. E-mail: 

giaminhnguyentruong@gmail.com 

EOI: http://eoi.citefactor.org/10.11251/acoj.12.05.009 

  

Abstract 

We cannot deny that pronunciation skill plays an essential role in our lives in this integration 

era. If we have good pronunciation, we can have a  chance to get a good job. However, as I 

researched before, many Vietnamese people nowadays are stuck in pronunciation when 

speaking English. It means that students can still express their ideas about particular issues. 

Still, their worst accents may make the listeners misunderstand essential information because 

they could not wholly hear what students have said. Therefore, this study aims to research 

learning and to teach English via analyzing some related scientific articles. Besides, we also 

found a way to learn pronunciation online effectively when the Covid-19 pandemic still 

occurs everywhere in Ho Chi Minh City, which can help students still protect their health 

and gain new knowledge at the same time. On the other hand, we also found some helpful 

exercises that can help students practice pronunciation by themselves after class. 

Keywords: pronunciation skill, integration era, online learning, teachers, Covid-19 

pandemic 

 

 

1. Introduction 

Speaking skills play an important role in language learning and teaching nowadays, and 

pronunciation is also an important part of this skill. In the integration era, Vietnamese people 

have more chances to communicate with foreigners in dealing with a contract, holding a trade 

promotion, and signing an MOU. If the manager has good speaking skills and good 

pronunciation that can help the international partners understand the message that we would 

like to express, their deals may be successful. Therefore, in this paper, the author will introduce 

the real definition of pronunciation in English speaking activities and the benefits that it brings 

to the students to help them communicate with the foreigners effectively, and if they achieve a 

good style of speaking, they will get a good chance in their future career. 

The most effective way for students to practice speaking is a face-to-face method in the 

traditional class. At this time, they can organize many activities to improve their pronunciation. 

However, because the pandemic of Covid-19 is occurring strongly in Ho Chi Minh City. Most 

eoi:%20http://eoi.citefactor.org/10.11251/acoj.12.05.009
eoi:%20http://eoi.citefactor.org/10.11251/acoj.12.05.009


https://asiacall.info/acoj Nguyen Truong Gia Minh                                Vol. 12; No. 5; 2021 

130 
 

classes have changed into the online form. It means that students do not have many chances to 

practice the skill with the teachers/friends, and they must spend much time practicing the skills 

at home by themselves and this article will point out some effective ways to modify their 

accents. 

To help students improve their pronunciation by themselves, internet and mobile applications 

and even the traditional coursebook are the most convenient means to help students boost their 

skills and avoid mistakes while speaking to each other. 

According to Norris-Holt (2005), motivation plays an important role in helping students to 

achieve their goals in learning English or even other foreign languages. It is also a factor that 

assesses the level of student success in learning ESL as well as another second language. 

Shaaban (2002) expressed the idea that motivation is also one factor that identifies students' 

success in learning a second language.   

On the other hand, according to Prasant (2018), the students who have worse pronunciation 

may feel lonely, face-off with difficulties in finding a job, and may be seen as uneducated with 

superficial knowledge in pronunciation and phonetics. 

Besides learning pronunciation skills via online platforms nowadays, Van et al. (2021)  and 

Nguyen (2021) stated that gadgets nowadays are the key tools that help students to improve 

their English level. On the other hand, Bhatti (2021) showed that information technology has 

helped teachers to access new information in recent years and helps students to expand their 

knowledge easily 

 

2. Literature review 

a. What is pronunciation? 

According to Dalton and Seidholfers (1994), pronunciation is an activity in which the 

speakers produce sounds to each other. This activity aims to bring meaningful expression 

messages from speakers to listeners. This activity relates to some factors like intonation, stress, 

rhythms, phrasing, and timing. 

On the other hand, Pourhosein (2016) stated that this is a product of English sounds. 

Students learn to pronounce words by repeating the sounds they heard, and when they get 

wrong, teachers will correct their mistakes immediately.  

In addition, pronunciation is also a way to speak out one word that is accepted by the 

crowd. 

b. The importance of pronunciation in learning English 

According to Underhill (2010), the four reasons below are really helpful to make 

pronunciation become an important part of learning English. Firstly, pronunciation can be 

applied to learn other listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. Secondly, pronunciation 



ACOJ- ISSN 1936-9859 AsiaCALL Online Journal                                               Vol. 12; No. 5; 2021 

131 

also helps us to improve our listening skills. Besides, it is also a physical side of language, and 

it impacts our self-esteem. 

In addition, if students can read and write well, but they do not pronounce well, it also 

means that they still cannot acquire the knowledge of the language well. Therefore, if the 

students would like to succeed in learning a language, the teachers' teaching method is really 

important. 

c. Some helpful tips to improve pronunciation 

There are many ways to improve our pronunciation skills. Thanks to Lewis (2020), we 

have discovered some good ways to help us boost our pronunciation up to a new level. Firstly, 

students should learn to hear each sound correctly. From that, they can distinguish the 

differences between all sounds, such as two couples, “l” and “r”, “sh” and “ch”. Secondly, they 

should practice the movement of the mouth. Pronunciation is a mixture of some activities from 

many parts of our face like lips, tongue, throat, and jaw. Thirdly, they should use the podcast to 

learn English, record the hard-to-remember words and repeat them until they can remember 

them all. Fourthly, let's apply the shadowing method. It means they should repeat all the words 

that they can hear from the podcasts. Fifthly, they should record themselves to identify their 

mistakes to improve their pronunciation. Finally, they must spend much time practicing 

speaking. When they try hard to speak, it also means they can change the way of pronunciation. 

d. Some tips for teaching English online for teachers 

According to Bhagan (2021), some helpful conditions could help the teachers prepare 

good online English periods. Firstly, they should pay a lot of money for teaching devices such 

as the best laptops and high-quality webcam and headphones. Besides, you also need to have 

enough RAM to make the teaching programs work. 

In addition, Benwell (2011) showed some tips that teachers could simplify our online 

lessons. Firstly, teachers should encourage students to come to the class regularly. Then, 

teachers will list out some problematic phonemes for students to remember. Next, teachers work 

on the intonation problems. Simultaneously, teachers also need to emphasize each problematic 

phoneme for students to apply correctly while they pronounce the word. After that, they must 

remember the pacing and apply the linking word to make their speech more smooth. Students 

should also listen to the different accents from different English-speaking countries to improve 

their listening comprehension skills. After all, they answer the focused question. 

2.1 Research Questions  

To support the purpose of the study, the investigation aims  to answer the following research 

questions:  

1. Which are the best teaching methods that help students to improve their 

pronunciation? 

2. How can teachers support the students’ process of learning pronunciation skills at 

home? 

 



https://asiacall.info/acoj Nguyen Truong Gia Minh                                Vol. 12; No. 5; 2021 

132 
 

3. Methods 

3.1 Pedagogical Setting & Participants 

This study was conducted online by researching the available articles and some available theses. 

Then the writer will analyze the final result via her own opinions and the articles' authors.  

3.2 Design of the Study 

This research will use a qualitative method for consuming time, and the method we will apply 

is content analysis. Although the online learning process occurs easily, the complex process of 

collecting research data from students via online forms seems not simple. In fact, we should 

spend really much time brainstorming about the forms of the questions, the arrangement of the 

forms and we should also spend many hours to attract the students to join in the survey as well 

as continuously follow the numbers of the participants. It will take us very much time and cause 

stress. Therefore, it is better to know how to collect data from scientific articles to get all of 

them easily and not spend many hours for the analysis process. 

 

4. Analysis 

a. Tools 

As we know that, the data we can take from this method includes a graph, images, texts, 

etc. On the other hand, in this Covid-19 pandemic, the author did not have many good 

conditions to go out to collect the data. Therefore, this is a good way to serve the aim of this 

research. According to Bhasin (2020), content analysis brings the researcher a lot of advantages.  

Firstly, it reveals the differences in communication in the different contexts. Next, it also 

showed the relations of some information that we used for showing to the audiences. Thirdly, 

it shows the international differences in the content of communication in the different contexts. 

It also detects the reality of expressing information and bias in communication as well as the 

other types of communication. In addition, it also describes the reaction of the participants 

clearly. 

 

5. Results 

The author will divide this section into two small parts. Firstly, we will list some exercises 

that students can practice by themselves at home. Secondly, the result will also show the way 

that teachers can support the students to learn English online as well as assess the results of the 

process of self-learning English. 

At first, after researching some articles, the writer has detected some of the prominent 

methods and types of exercise which help students to improve their pronunciation skills.  

 

 



ACOJ- ISSN 1936-9859 AsiaCALL Online Journal                                               Vol. 12; No. 5; 2021 

133 

a. Students’ practice exercises 

According to Purwanto (2019), there are four types of exercises that can help students to 

improve their pronunciation:  

• Read aloud 

In this exercise, students receive a small word pronunciation exercise at home. It may 

include some vocabulary or the whole passage. Especially in the example below, this exercise 

aims to help students read the words that can cause mistakes with the other two in the same 

line. This word aims to help the students hear what their mouth expresses and avoid the mistake; 

they can stand in front of the mirror to see the movement of their mouth and hear the sounds 

that they produce. From that, they can modify the errors they have made when speaking English. 

The three sentences below will strongly represent examples that can help students modify their 

pronunciation styles, like the sound "ed" and "th. 

1) Bead  Bed Bid 

2) Catched crashed occupied coughed 

3) Through author clothes thumb 

• Listen and Repeat 

This activity can help students boost their level of pronunciation up and modify the 

pronunciation style. In this activity, students will listen to the whole text or conversation for the 

first time. Then, the second time, they will hear each sentence in the conversation and repeat it 

with the whole class or by themselves. After the third time, they still make mistakes; teachers 

will help them to correct their errors. The most important thing about this activity is that they 

should turn on their camera for teachers to follow their mouth movement.  

• Tongue Twister 

This method aims to help students have a good reflex in speaking English when they 

must read a sentence containing the words that have the same initial syllable, which is really 

difficult to say. They should read these sentences at a fast speed to practice controlling the way 

they pronounce that string of words. As much they practice, as they can improve their 

pronunciation style. There are some samples of the tongue-twister sentence below:  

1) She sees many ships by the sea-shore 

2) She saw the shade of a see-saw. 

3) She sells a shell in a sea-shore. 

4) This shoe-brush is sold in a shop 

• Recording of Learner’s Production 

At the end of the course, the learner can record their voice when they tell the stories or 

sing a song to identify the mistakes and correct them fast. On the other hand, Maurin (2018) 

advised the students to learn the phonetic alphabet because when they remember the alphabet, 

they can distinguish the differences between each sound to have an exact pronunciation for the 

syllables, which has the same way of reading. Next, he suggested that students should clearly 

understand the spoken language rules. If they use the spoken language much, the way they 

pronounce the word of this language becomes more easily. If students have difficulty 

pronouncing a word, let ask other people to repeat that word, and students will record their 



https://asiacall.info/acoj Nguyen Truong Gia Minh                                Vol. 12; No. 5; 2021 

134 
 

voice to remember the way of speaking the word. Then, they should listen to the radio as much 

as possible to identify the fluent pronunciation, and they can copy the way the character 

pronounces the hard word. Finally, do not stop practicing pronunciation by themselves to 

improve their skills every day. 

There are seven ways to improve pronunciation that Maurin (2018) has cited in his 

paper. However, in this paper, the author has just taken 3 of them because these ways seem so 

easy to conduct, and we should not spend much time and money for them to improve our 

pronunciation skills. Every day we need to spend one hour applying one of these ways, and this 

process must happen continuously in one month to get the highest efficiency. It is also easy for 

us to find the materials for practicing like CDs or television for listening, a repeating e-book 

for a tongue twister, and the telephone for recording learners' production. 

From these analyses, I also agree with Van et al. (2021)'s opinion that is when students apply 

technology for learning English. They will recognize the effectiveness of all four macro skills, 

including listening, reading, writing, and speaking. 

b. How can teachers support students in English pronunciation? 

In learning English, especially in pronunciation activities, the teacher plays the role of 

a coach to check and guide the way students pronounce the words. While helping students, they 

should control some factors such as speech production and speech performance of the students. 

Besides, they should help students make long-term and short-term plans, do group work on 

online platforms, work with the record system, and analyze each student's fluency level. Finally, 

they should tell students to change their awareness of their wrong pronunciation and encourage 

them to change their pronunciation actively, and they will control the changing process of their 

students. 

 

6. Conclusion 

As we know, in this integration era, pronunciation skills become more and more important 

with students in their future careers and their lives. However, if the students do not know the 

effective ways of learning this skill, they cannot pronounce English fluently. 

Besides, there are many ways for students to learn pronunciation by themselves at home. 

The most important thing that students should do now is try their best to learn English 

pronunciation by themselves, applying all of the methods cited in this article. 

Simultaneously, the teacher also plays a vital role in students’ self-learning process via 

online platforms to help them be confident with their ability when they learn at home. According 

to Kologdarh (2010), teachers should care about the needs and problems of pronunciation. This 

author also shows that teachers should have a detailed assessment for students to improve their 

pronunciation skills and avoid errors. 

On the other hand, teachers also need to help students distinguish British English and 

American English in different ways of pronouncing one word between two different cultures. 



ACOJ- ISSN 1936-9859 AsiaCALL Online Journal                                               Vol. 12; No. 5; 2021 

135 

From that, students can also improve not only their pronunciation skills but also they can 

improve their speaking skills and listening skills. 

 

References  

Benwell, T. (2011). Teaching Pronunciation Online. Retrieved in 

https://www.teachingvillage.org/2011/06/07/teaching-pronunciation-online/ 

Bhagan, S. (2021). Teaching English Online: Convenient, meaningful and a  great way to get 

money. Retrieved in https://www.goabroad.com/articles/teach-abroad/teaching-english-

online 

Bhasin, H. (2020). Important of Quantitative Research. Retrieved in 

https://www.marketing91.com/importance-of-quantitative-research/ 

Bhatti, M. S. (2021). Investigating the Role of ICT for teaching English at Elementary Level. 

AsiaCall Online Journal, 12 (2), 87-93. Retrieved in 

https://asiacall.info/acoj/index.php/journal/article/view/35  

Dalton, C. & Barbara S. (1994). Pronunciation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Kologdarh (2010). ESL/EFL learner’ perception of their pronunciation needs and strategies. 

The Forty-First Annual State CATESOL Conference, Santa Clara. 

Lewis, R. (2020). How to improve your English pronunciation. Retrieved in 

https://www.leonardoenglish.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-english-pronunciation  

Maurin, M. (2018). Improve your accent with these 5 simple tricks. Retrieved in 

https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-to-improve-your-accent-with-these-5-

simple-tricks  

Norris-Holt, J. (2005). Motivation as a contributing factor in second language. Retrieved in 

http://iteslj.org/articles/norris-motivation.html 

Nguyen, Thi Hong Nhat (2021). Developing Bottom-up Listening Skills in a Google 

Classroom-Based EFL module. AsiaCall Online Journal, 12 (3),47-57. Retrieved in 

https://asiacall.info/acoj/index.php/journal/article/view/45  

Pourhosein, G.A. (2016). What factors influence the English Pronunciation of EFL learners. 

Modern Journal of Language Teaching Methods, 6 (2), 314-326 

Prashant, D. P. (2018). Importance of pronunciation in English Language communication. 

Pronunciation and Communication, 7 (2), 16-17. Retrieved from Sep-2018_5.pdf 

(voiceofresearch.org) 

Purwanto, A. (2019). Teaching pronunciation using varieties of pronunciation teaching 

materials and practice. Journal of English Language Teaching, 3 (2), 89-90 

Rogers, P. (2017). The Importance of teaching pronunciation. Retrieved in 

https://community.lincs.ed.gov/group/20/discussion/importance-teaching-

pronunciation 

Shaaban, K., (2002). Affect in language learning. Retrieved from 

https://abisamra03.tripod.com/motivation/ 

https://www.teachingvillage.org/2011/06/07/teaching-pronunciation-online/
https://www.goabroad.com/articles/teach-abroad/teaching-english-online
https://www.goabroad.com/articles/teach-abroad/teaching-english-online
https://www.marketing91.com/importance-of-quantitative-research/
https://asiacall.info/acoj/index.php/journal/article/view/35
https://www.leonardoenglish.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-english-pronunciation
https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-to-improve-your-accent-with-these-5-simple-tricks
https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-to-improve-your-accent-with-these-5-simple-tricks
http://iteslj.org/articles/norris-motivation.html
https://asiacall.info/acoj/index.php/journal/article/view/45
http://www.voiceofresearch.org/Doc/Sep-2018/Sep-2018_5.pdf
http://www.voiceofresearch.org/Doc/Sep-2018/Sep-2018_5.pdf
https://community.lincs.ed.gov/group/20/discussion/importance-teaching-pronunciation
https://community.lincs.ed.gov/group/20/discussion/importance-teaching-pronunciation
https://abisamra03.tripod.com/motivation/


https://asiacall.info/acoj Nguyen Truong Gia Minh                                Vol. 12; No. 5; 2021 

136 
 

Underhill, A. (2010). Four reasons to teach pronunciation. Retrieved in 

https://www.adrianunderhill.com/2010/11/23/four-reasons-to-teach-pronunciation/  

Van, L. K., Dang, T. A., Pham, D. B. T., Vo, T. T. N., & Pham, V. P. H.(2021). The 

Effectiveness of Using Technology in Learning English. AsiaCALL Online Journal, 

12(2), 24-40. Retrieved from 

https://asiacall.info/acoj/index.php/journal/article/view/26  

 

Biodata 

Nguyen Truong Gia Minh is a journalist at Nguoi Lao Dong Newspaper and is currently 

studying for a Master of English Language at Hoa Sen University, Vietnam. She had 1 year of 

experience in working as a teacher assistant of English Only Day – An activity for students of 

University of Economics and Finance (UEF) to improve their English pronunciation. Her 

academic interest areas are about teaching and training English speaking and writing skills for 

university students. 

 

https://www.adrianunderhill.com/2010/11/23/four-reasons-to-teach-pronunciation/
https://asiacall.info/acoj/index.php/journal/article/view/26

