Mapping Students’ Phonological Problems in Pronouncing English Sounds: A Study on Speakers of Local Languages in West Nusa Tenggara

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.200827.050How to use a DOI?

Keywords

mispronunciation, English students, local language speakers, West Nusa Tenggara

Abstract

Learning English to EFL learners must always be challenging since it requires not only the willingness for learning, but also students’ awareness of the phonological differences between the students’ mother tongue on one hand and English as the target language on the other. One of the potential problems is phonology. This study aims at describing the students’ phonological problems in pronouncing English segmental sounds. There are 10 students’ each of local language speakers taken as the sample in this study. Data is gained by using phonological test. In the test, the sample were asked to pronounce English words of which the sounds do not exist in each local language phonology. The result reveals that, there two English sounds found to be a problem encountered by Sasak students, both of which are consonants. The sounds are fricative labiodental voiceless /f/ as in /fʌðər/ pronounced /fʌðər / in inital position, /stʌf/ pronounced /stʌp/, and /hʌlf/ pronounced /hʌlp/ in the last position and labiodental fricative voiced /v/ as in /varieisən/ pronounced /parieisən/ in initial position, /weiv/ pronounced /weip/ in the last position. This mispronunciation was encountered by 2 out of 10 students. For Bimanese students, consonants alveolar plosive voiced /d/, alveolar plosive voiceless /t/, and open middle central vowel /ə/ were mispronounced with labiodental plosive voiced /D/, labiodental plosive voicelss /T/, and midle front vowel /e/ respectively. This mispronunciation was encountered by 4 out of 10 students. What seems interesting is that the evidence found in Sumbawan students which shares the same as in both neighboring students. There are 2 students out of 10 who mispronounced the labiodental fricative voiceless /f/ and labiodental fricative voiced /v/ with bilabial plosive voiced /p/ as Sasak students did. Meanwhile, the other 2 students mispronounced the open middle central vowel /ə/ with middle front vowel /e/ as encountered by Bimanese students. This result is expected to draw a pedagogical implication for English learners to speakers of three local languages in West Nusa Tenggara.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Arafiq Arafiq
AU  - Kamaludin Yusra
AU  - Agus Saputra
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/08/28
TI  - Mapping Students’ Phonological Problems in Pronouncing English Sounds: A Study on Speakers of Local Languages in West Nusa Tenggara
BT  - Proceedings of the 1st Annual Conference on Education and Social Sciences (ACCESS 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 199
EP  - 202
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.200827.050
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.200827.050
ID  - Arafiq2020
ER  -