Among
eight English diphthongs, Indonesian students tend to have difficulties in
pronouncing diphthongs [аυ] and rather easier in pronouncing diphthong [ɔɪ].
There are some factors influencing students have difficulties in pronouncing
English diphthongs. First is the influence of students’ mother language. Second
is the lack of knowledge in English sound system. Third is unsuccessful in using
borrowed English words. For example in word “horizon” [hə:raizn]. Because in
Indonesia, the word horizon is also used and modified as horison, Indonesian students pronounced it based on
Indonesian language version.
INDONESIAN
STUDENTS’ DIFFICULTIES IN PRONOUNCING ENGLISH
DIPHTHONGS*
Andri Donal
University
of Pasir Pengaraian
ABSTRACT
One of Indonesian students' difficulties in learning
English is pronouncing English sounds correctly. Indonesian language as mother
tongue influences significantly to the way of Indonesian students in
pronouncing English sounds. Compared to English, Indonesian language generally
does not have differences between spelling the letter and pronouncing the
sounds. Among all English sounds, diphthongs are assumed as one of the most
difficulties pronounced by Indonesian students. This study is to explore the
difficulties got by Indonesian students in pronouncing English diphthongs. This
study was conducted to thirty five students of University of Pasir Pengaraian,
Riau Province by using mix method where the researcher gave test to measure
students' pronunciation mastery and observation to strengthen the data. The
result of study showed that the most difficult of English diphthong was [аυ] sound. Factors influencing students have
difficulties in pronouncing English diphthongs were mother language interfere,
lack of knowledge in English sound systems and unsuccessful in using borrowed
English words. This study is expected can give contribution in improving
Indonesian students pronunciation especially diphthong sounds.
Keywords:
pronouncing, difficulty, English
diphthong,
Havinga good speaking like native speakers is one dream of foreign language students
including for Indonesian students who learn English as foreign language.
However, to realize it is not easy. One of Indonesian difficulties in learning
English speaking is how to pronounce English sounds correctly. Cruthers (1987:191)
explains the reasons why learning another language pronunciation are difficult;
first, some sounds of the new or target language do not exist in the learner’s
native language. The second is in the difference of distribution between native
language and the target language. In addition, Nation and Newton (2009:78)
mention there are five factors affect on learning of another sound system. They
are, the age of the learner, the learner’s first language, the learner’s
current stage of proficiency development, the experience and attitudes of the
learner, and the condition for teaching and learning. It means that the
differences between learner native language and target language will impact to
sounds produced by foreign language learner.
Moreover,
Derwin and Murno (2005) argue that having a good pronunciation of the language
can help in normal communication, particularly intelligibility. In other words,
learning how to pronounce another language sounds is very important in
interaction and wrong in
pronunciation can make misunderstanding in conversation. So, introducing
the correct English pronunciation to the English students can reduce the error produced
in pronouncing English pronunciation. Pennington and Richards (1986) divided
pronunciation into articulation of individual sounds and the distinctive
features of sounds like voicing and aspiration, voice-setting features, and
stress and intonation. Dalton
and Seidlhover (2005) distribute speech sounds belong to one or other of the
four main classes known as vowels, consonants, diphthong and triphtongs. According
to Jones (1975:23) a vowel (in normal speech) is defined as a voiced sounds in
forming which the air issues in continuous stream through the pharynx and
mouth, there being no obstruction and no narrowing such as would cause audible
friction. Roach (2009) defines consonant as a sound,
voiced and voiceless, in which the airstream an obstructed through a narrowing
or complete closure of the mouth passage. While diphtongs sounds occur
when there is a
deliberate glide made from one vowel position to another vowel position, and
which is produced in one syllable (Ramelan 1999). According to Roach (2009:30) triphthongs is a glide
from one vowel to another and then to a third, all produce rapidly and without interruption.
These classes of speech sounds have different
difficulties for foreign language learners especially for Indonesian. There
are some studies conducted to find out related to how English sound
learned by Indonesian students. Prananingrum and Kwary (2006:1)
proved that Indonesian learners also faced difficulties in producing
English sounds since English and Indonesian have different sounds
distribution. Tiono and Yostanto (2008) conducted a
study about English Phonological Errors Produced by English
Department Students where the result shows that the students produced thirty-four kinds
of phonological errors and that the deviations occurred most frequently before,
after, or in between vowels. However, this study focuses on students’
difficulties in pronouncing English diphthongs. The phenomena during teaching
in English department where students have difficulties in pronouncing English
sounds especially in pronouncing English diphthongs has triggered researcher to
conduct this study.
According
to J.D.O'Conner a diphthong is a glide from one vowel to another, and the whole
glide acts like one of the long simple vowels. While "pure" vowels,
or monophthongs, are said to have one target tongue position, diphthongs have
two target tongue positions. Diphthongs are represented by two symbols,
for example English "same" as [seim],
where the two vowel symbols are intended to represent approximately the
beginning and ending tongue positions
[J.D.O'Conner 1980, 84]. Although a diphthong is normally represented in
phonetic writing by two vowel symbols, this does not follow that both vowel
sounds are equally syllabic. Ramelan (1999) writes that “a diphthong is
pronounced in one syllable, or produced with one single impulse of breath.
Therefore, when the sequence of two vowels is produced with two impulses of
breath, it is not a diphthong, but it is said to be dissyllabic or just an
ordinary sequence of two vowel sounds”.
Gerald Kelly groups the 8
diphthongs of English language in the following way [Kelly 2000, 34]:
a) Centring diphthongs which
end with a glide towards central vowel [ә]. The examples are as follows:
1. Diphthong
[ɪə]. The glide
of /ɪə/ begins with a tongue position approximately that used for /ɪ/,
centralized front half-close, and moves in the direction of the more open variety
of /ə/ when /ɪə/ is final in the word; in non-final positions. Example: ear,
era, here, fear, beer, dear and career.
2. Diphthong [υә]. /υә/ glides from a tongue
position similar to that used for /υ/ towards the more open type of /ə/ which forms the end-point
of all three centering diphthong with, again, a somewhat closer variety of /ə/
when the diphthong occurs in a closed syllabel. Example: tour, moor, poor,
sure, pure, and cure.
3. Diphthong [ɛə]. The glide
of /ɛə/ begins in the half-open front position, approximately c [ɛ], and move
in the direction of the more open variety of /ə/, especially when the diphthong
is final; where /ɛə/ occurs in a syllable closed by a consonant the /ə/ element
tends to be a mid /ə/ type, the lips are neutrally open though-out. Example:
heir, care, bare, where and chair.
b) Closing diphthongs which
end with a glide towards [ɪ] or towards [υ].The glide is towards a higher
position in the mouth. Examples:
4. Diphthong [eɪ]. The
glide begins from slightly below the half-close front position and moves in the
direction of /I/, there being a slight closing movement of the lower jaw; the
lips are spread. Examples: eight, veil, weigh, rein, they, prey, and grey.
5. Diphthong [ɔɪ]. For /ɔɪ/ the tongue glide begins at a point
between the back half-open and open positions and moves in the direction of
/I/. The tongue movement extends from back to centralized front, but the range
of closing in the glide is not as great as for /aɪ/; the jaw movement, though
considerable, may not therefore, be as marked as in the case of /aɪ/. Examples:
boy, toy, noise, voice, boil, ointment, and point.
6. Diphthong [ɑɪ]. The glide of /ɑɪ/ begins at a point slightly behind the front open position, and moves
in the direction of position associated whit /I/, although the tongue is not
usually raised to a level closer than C [ё]; the glide is much more extensive
than that of [eɪ], the closing movement of
the lower jaw being obvious. Example: time, write, bite, climb, cry, dry, by,
and try.
7. Diphthong [әυ]. The glide of /əʊ/ begins at a central position, between
half-close and half-open, and moves in the direction of /ʊ/, there being a
slight closing movement of the lower jaw; the lips are neutral for the 1st
element, but have a tendency to round on the 2nd element. Example:
ocean, over, open, cold, both, omen, only and those.
8. Diphthong [аυ]. The
glide of /aυ/ begins at a point between
the back and front open positions, slightly more fronted than the position for
/a:/, and moves in the direction of /ʊ/, though the tongue may not be raised
higher than the half-close level. Example: owl, ounce, down, brown, sound, our
and towel.
In
learning English diphthongs, students often got difficulties. Harmer (2007:250)
mentions problems faced by English foreign language learner in learning
diphthongs. They are as follows:
1) What students can hear.
Some students have great difficulty hearing
pronunciation features which we want them to reproduce. Frequently, speakers of
different first languages have problems with different sounds
2) What students can say.
Learning a foreign language often presents us with the
problem of physical unfamiliarity (i.e. it is actually physically difficult to
make the sound using particular parts of the mouth, uvula or nasal cavity).
3) The intonation problem
Some of us (and many of our students) find it
extremely difficult to hear tunes or to identify the different patterns of
rising and falling tones.
To
help students in facing pronunciation difficulties, Kelly (2000:16) suggests
two strategies in pronunciation teaching: drilling and chaining. Basic form of drilling involves teacher
saying a word or structure, and getting students to repeat it. Aim of drilling
is to help students achieve better pronunciation of language items, and help
them remember new item. It is assumed can encourage students to bring up a
word, phrase of structure as they study before. Teachers generally use prompts,
pictures, mimes etc, to help learning process along. Here, the role of teacher
is as a model of the word, phrase or structure for students to copy. Different with drilling, chaining is used to
drill long sentences involving difficult words and sounds. Teachers separate
certain words from sentence, and model them separately for students to repeat,
and gradually build the sentence up until they become complete sentences.
METHOD
There were thirty five students of English Study
Program, University of Pasir Pengaraian participating in this research. They
have different mother languages: Malay, Bataknese, Javanese, Sundanese, and
Minangnese. The data of research were collected by recording students’
pronunciation while reading English text and observation during teaching
learning process. After identifying the words containing diphthong sounds,
researcher categorized them based on the kinds of English diphthongs. There
were eight kinds of diphthongs with the total diphthongs was thirty five
diphthong sounds. The next steps were describing and analyzing the data. The
data were analyzed quantitatively to find out students’ ability in pronouncing
English and qualitatively to describe students’ difficulties in pronouncing
English diphthongs.
FINDINGS AND
DISCUSSION
There are eight English
diphthongs that were analyzed in this research. They are English centering
diphthong consist of [ɪə], [ɛə], [υә]. The English closing diphthong consists of [aɪ], [eɪ],
[ɔɪ], [aʊ], and [əʊ]. The raters identified students pronounce and the
researcher analyzed was categorized into following table.
Table 1 Students’ Ability in pronouncing English
Diphthongs
No
|
Diphthongs
|
Average Score
|
1
|
[ɪə]
|
68,0
|
2
|
[υә]
|
54,5
|
3
|
[ɛə]
|
51,4
|
4
|
[eɪ]
|
75,0
|
5
|
[ɔɪ]
|
82,0
|
6
|
[ɑɪ]
|
61,5
|
7
|
[әʊ]
|
60,2
|
8
|
[аʊ]
|
48,2
|
From the table 1, it can be seen that students’ tend
to have difficulties in pronouncing diphthongs [аυ] and rather easier in
pronouncing diphthong [ɔɪ]. Based on the test given to students, there were
some students had difficulties in pronouncing English diphthongs.
1. Diphthong [ɪə].
In diphthong [ɪə] some students pronounce the word “deer” [dɪər] wrongly.
Some of them pronounce it as [der] and [di:r]. Here there are two wrong ways in
pronouncing diphthong [ɪə] in word
“deer” and changed it into short vowel [e] and long vowel [i:]. Another example
was in the word “year” [yɪər] that pronounced wrongly as [yɪr] and [yer].
2. Diphthong [ʊә].
Among some
examples of English words that have diphthong sound, the word “during” mostly
pronounced wrongly by students. They should have pronounced it as [djʊəriŋ]
rather than [dariŋ] or [du:riŋ].
3. Diphthong [ɛə].
From thirty
five students as sample, thirty two students pronounced the word “there” /ðεər/wrongly. Some
students pronounced it such as [ðɪer], [ðeɪr] and [ðer].
4. Diphthong [eɪ]
From the test, it can be known that some difficulties in pronouncing diphthong
[eɪ] were the word “day” [dei]
which pronounced as [dai]. It can be difficult for students because of the
influence of Indonesian language where the letter “y” usually pronounced become
[i]. Another pronunciation mistake made
by students was the word “lake” [leik] that pronounced became [laik].
5. Diphthong [ɔɪ].
Diphthong [ɔɪ] seems not too difficult
for Indonesian students, because there is similarity in the way of pronouncing
the [ɔɪ] sound between Indonesian language and English. For example in the word
“boy”, most students can pronounce it well. However, there were some students
pronounced the word “ointment” [ɔɪntmənt] wrongly and changed into [ɑɪntmənt].
6. Diphthong [ɑɪ]
Looking at the pattern of words, the sounds of diphthong [ɑɪ] usually occur
in the following pattern; consonant letter followed by vowel “i” such as “time,
write, bite, climb” or consonant followed by letter “y’ such as “cry, dry, by,
and try”., students should be easier in pronouncing diphthong [ɑɪ]. However, in this study, some students still
have difficulties in pronouncing diphthong [ɑɪ]. For example, they
pronounced the word “why” [wai] to [wei]. The habitual of pronouncing English word that has been used/borrowed by
Indonesia language also affected to pronunciation error of diphthongs such the
word “horizon” [hə:raizn] that pronounced as [horizon].
7. Diphthong [әυ].
The sound of diphthong [әυ] mostly is produced in letter “o” such as words “ocean, over, open, cold,
both, and those. For Indonesia students it is rather difficult because they
used to pronounce letter “o” with [o] sound. In this study, most students pronounced the word “home” [həʊm]
became [hom]. It can be caused there is Indonesian word has the sound [әυ]. It
is clearer in word “no” [nəʊ] that was pronounced [no]. It means the habitual of Indonesian
students in pronouncing “o” letter affected to error they produced.
8. Diphthong
[аʊ]
The sound [aʊ] is produced when the word constructed by “ou”
letters such “mountain, found, wounded, and out”. Some student in this study
made error in pronouncing diphthong
[аʊ], for example in word “mountain” [maʊntən] that pronounced into [mountein].
The same case also occurred in words “out”, “found”, and “wounded”, where students did not pronounced letter “ou”
into sound [aʊ] but same with the letter.
From
the explanation above, it can be summed that some students still have
difficulties in pronouncing English diphthongs. There are some factors
influencing students have difficulties in pronouncing English diphthongs. First
is the influence of students’ mother language. Dulay
(1982:97) stated that the first language has been considered the villain in
second language learning as the major cause of a learner’s problem in mastery
the new language. Most of Indonesian students can speak more than one
language. This will affect to them when learning English especially in
pronouncing English sounds. Second is the lack of students’ knowledge about
English sound system. The sound system between Indonesian language and English
is different. In Indonesia, the letter or word tend to have similarity with it
sound. So it makes Indonesian students made error or difficulties in
pronouncing English word. For example, “go”, mango, do, does, and etc. It was related
with data from AGPS (1986) there are three diphthongs in Indonesian [ɔɪ], [eɪ] and [әʊ]. The third factor is unsuccessful
in using borrowed English words. In digital era, era where there is no border
among countries, the spread of language cannot be stopped. One language can
easily take from other languages. It also happens to Indonesian language that
borrows some words from other languages to enrich its vocabulary especially
from English. However, when Indonesian students use these words, they pronounce
them with Indonesian pronunciation. For example in word “horizon” [hə:raizn], Because in Indonesia, the word
horizon is also used and modified as horison,
Indonesian students pronounced it based on Indonesian language version [horizon]. The other examples are words
“domain”, “voucher”, “July” and etc.
In
addition, Nesgoda (1980) states that language learners may find difficulties in
learning to speak English well because several spelling may be represented by a
single sound. In addition, Lanteigne (2006) confirms that difficulties in
learning English occur due to the fact that some of English sounds do not exist
in the mother tongue of the learners. In this study it also occurs in diphthong
[әυ] for letter “o”. As a consequence of all the difficulties provided by the
English pronunciation, many English language learners as well as the Indonesian
learners tend to generate errors in the articulation of the sounds (Tiono and Yostanto, 2008).
Conclusion
Among eight English
diphthongs, Indonesian students tend to have difficulties in pronouncing
diphthongs [аυ] and rather easier in pronouncing diphthong [ɔɪ]. There are some
factors influencing students have difficulties in pronouncing English diphthongs.
First is the influence of students’ mother language. Second is the lack of
knowledge in English sound system. Third is unsuccessful in using borrowed
English words. For example in word “horizon” [hə:raizn]. Because in
Indonesia, the word horizon is also used and modified as horison, Indonesian students pronounced it based on
Indonesian language version.
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* This article has been presented in The 10th Free
Linguistics Conference held by Bung Hatta University on September 30 to October
1, 2016
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