Englishpronunciation is still a crucial problem among many students of the seventh grade inJunior High School Kamal, Madura.
They mostly mispronounce words. Theproblem is, the students do not realize that they make some pronunciationerrors when speaking or reading aloud in English. This usually happens because notall teachers pay much attention to their students’ pronunciation. They just teach the vocabulary found in thetext or utterances from the materials and give the examples of how to read thembut do not follow up the students’ pronunciation. Being curious with the frequent mispronunciations producedby the seventh grade students, the researcher investigated the problem in herclass. The qualitative study employed a single – case study design.
To collectthe data, a set of pronunciation test were administered. The test consistedthree parts: words, phrases and sentences. The findings show that the studentsproduced errors on vowels, consonantsand diphthongs.Keywords: Madurese Pronunciation, English Pronunciation, Errors, Phonology System Background Englishpronunciation is still a crucial problem among many Indonesian students. As what happens in other countries whereEnglish is a foreign language, the students do not have much exposure ofEnglish outside the classroom. Another condition is the strong influence of thelocal language besides the national one. Moreover, English pronunciation isoften different from the spelling.Theseare the words that are often mispronounced by the students of the seventhgraders.
busy / ?b?z.i / pronounced as / basi / or busi man / mæn / pronounced as / man / book / b?k / pronounced as / b?ks / From those examples, it can be said thatthe students still keep the Indonesian way of pronouncing words, which is the same as the spelling. Their pronunciation arealso influenced by Madurese pronunciation.
They do not realize that there aredifferent pronunciation systems of English and Indonesian. In Indonesian thereis no difference between the spellings of the words with their pronunciation.However, in English there is a difference between the spellings of the wordswith the pronunciation.
Instead of / mæn/ for man, they pronounced as / man / Or / b?k/ for book, they pronounced as/b?ks / and / ?b?z.i/ for busy, they pronounced as/ basi / or / busi/. Fromthese examples, it can be seen that the students are still influenced by theirL1 because they pronounce the words the same way as the spellings. Pronunciationis a key element in learning a language without which comprehension would behindered. According to the general taxonomy of errors classified by Corder(1975) L2 learners errors were divided into three groups of intralingual ordevelopmental errors; thesource of which traced back to the target language itself, interlingual orinterference errors, which are caused by the effect of the first language, andtraining errors, which are the result of wrong teaching techniques. Madurese language has a uniquepronunciation system. As it is unique that people who tryto learn Madurese experience difficulties, particularly interms of pronunciation earlier.
Madurese language pronunciation has snapped andis pressed mainly on the letters b, d, j, g, jh, dh and bh or the consonantcluster such as hh,dd and bb. Thecommon problems of Madurese speakers when they speak English is mainly thepronunciation of a double consonant at the final position, for example manyMadurese speakers pronounce the word ” born” as “bron”, the word “corn” to be”cron”. The double consonant “-rn” at the final position do not exist inMadurese. Method This study employed a single-case study designfor the reason that thestudy investigated a single state junior high school whichhas 18 classes. In regards with that, the study also providedin-depth analysis of the particular phenomenon, in this case the pronunciationerrors of English words and apply in this single-case study. Findings The data of this research were gathered fromthe students’ pronunciation errors that were elicited by using a pronunciationtest. The data are from the words, phrases and sentences that the studentsuttered.
This test is used to reveal the sound production by Madurese students.The data analyzed in this research are those features that the seventh gradestudents pronounced incorrectly. Discussion The researcher observed 30 words, 30 phrases and30 sentences by recording the seventh grade students’ pronunciation. Thepronunciation word test consisted of 30 words, the phrases pronunciation testconsisted of 65 words and the sentence pronunciation test consisted of 126words.
The total words tested were 412 and from those words, theresearcher found 221pronunciation errors. The errors consisted of three categories,they were the consonant errors, the vowels errors and the diphthongerrors. Conclusion and SuggestionTheresearcher found that there were many pronunciation errors made by the seventhgrade students in pronouncing English words. It was revealed that there werethree kinds of pronunciation errors; they were consonant, vowel and diphtongerrors.Fromthe data analysis, it was found that the errors occured potentially because ofthe influence of the first language. The first possibility is the differencephonological system between Madurese as the first language and the English asthe foreign language. The researcher has provided the complete explanationabout the different way of pronouncing the consonant, vowel,and diphthong inEnglish and Madurese.The researcher gave the students test in the sequences ofdifficulty in pronouncing the words, phrase and sentences.
SuggestionForEnglish teachers in Madura, the researcher suggests that in pronouncing theEnglish words they have to consider the good pronunciation, since differentpronunciation will cause difference in meaning. This can be done by frequentlylistening to the original sound or pronunciation of the native speaker fromoffline dictionary as Cambridge Oxford Dictionary and imitate the correctpronunciation. This will not only improve the teacher’s pronunciation but alsogive a good model to the students.
