AN ERROR ANALYSIS OF PRONOUNCING ENGLISH VOWELS AT THE SECOND SEMESTER STUDENTS OF ENGLISH EDUCATION PROGRAM IN MUHAMMADIYAH UNIVERSITY OF PURWOREJO IN THE ACADEMIC YEAR OF 2013/2014

Abstract

The main of problem the thesis is to find out what kinds of errors pronouncing English vowels made by the students’, and why these errors happen/occur. Beside, this thesis also aimed at investigating vowels pronunciation errors made by the students’ in discovering sounds that appear to be problem for them. This research is design as descriptive qualitative research. In this study the researcher focused on the second semester students of class E of English Education Program in Muhammadiyah University of Purworejo in the Academic Year of 2013/2014. There are 36 students as the subject of the research. The process of data collection in this research had to be put in two activities, those are: recording and transcription. The results of the analysis shows that students are considered “good” in pronouncing English vowels because the total percentage of errors in pronouncing English vowels is 25.37%. There are six types of dominant errors. There are errors in pronouncing English vowel [ә:] 13.87%, vowel [æ] 12.77%, vowel [ә] 12.04%, vowel [ɔ:] 10.95%, [i:] 9.85%, vowel [ε] 9.49%. The factors from this problem are by the interference errors, intralingual errors and developmental errors. The researcher suggests helping the students; 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