AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ ERRORS IN PRONOUNCING ENGLISH VOWELS

ABSTRACT
AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ ERRORS IN PRONOUNCING ENGLISH
VOWELS (A case Study of the Eleventh Grade of SMA N I Sigaluh
Banjarnegara in the Academic Year 2006/2007). Name: Wasis Tri Puspita.
Final Project. English Department. Languages and Art Faculty. Semarang
State University.

This final project is a study about an analysis of students’ errors in
pronouncing English vowels made by the eleventh grade students of SMA Negeri
I Sigaluh Banjarnegara in the Academic Year 2006/2007. Most of the students
may have problems to pronounce English vowels, although they get an English
subject in their school and they can not master the English pronunciation well.
Therefore, the students often make errors. This study was conducted under the
consideration that pronouncing English vowels plays an important role.
The problems of this study are what kinds of errors the students make in
pronouncing English vowels and why these errors happen/occur.
The purposes of the study are to find out kinds of errors made by students
in pronouncing English vowels and to find out the factors why these errors
happen/occur.
The population of this study was the eleventh grade of SMA Negeri I
Sigaluh Banjarnegara in the Academic year of 2006/2007. Before the test doing
the test, the writer tried-out to the thirty three students. The writer decided to give
the try-out test item to the students to measure the validity and reliability of the
test. The instrument used by the writer in this final project were a test, tape
recorder, and some blank cassettes, which were used to record the students’
pronunciation. In analyzing the data, error analysis was used in which there were
four steps: transcribing the students’ pronunciation into the phonetic
transcriptions, grouping the students’ errors in pronouncing English vowels into
separate divisions, employing the percentage descriptive analysis to count all error
and interpreting the result of the data analysis
Finally, the result of the analysis shows that students are considered
“Excellent” in pronouncing English vowels. The total percentage of various errors
in pronouncing English vowels is 23.33%. There are five types of dominant
errors. There are vowel [i:] (5.31%), vowel [æ] (6.22%), vowel [a:] (6.67%),
vowel [ :] (6.67%), and vowel [ ] (0.76%).
To help the students improve their pronunciation proficiency, the writer
suggests that they should be given a lot of drills and practices relating to the
pronunciation so that they can acquire the habit of using the correct pronunciation
of English words containing English vowels correctly regardless of language
skills they are dealing with.
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