Abstract:
Second language acquisition has become a big issue in recent years. When
a person speaks a second language, sometime after they have acquired their native
tongue, we would expect that either aspects of their native language and of the
language learning problem of the L2 itself would interfere the pronunciation of
the target language. The objectives of the study are to find out the errors on the
pronunciation of diphthongs made by the students of the 1st grade in SMK
Puspajati Buluspesantren Kebumen and to find out what are the sources of the
errors on the pronunciation of diphthongs.
In conducting this research, the researcher uses descriptive qualitative
method. This study attempts to find out the difficulties encountered by the
students of the first grade vocational high school in producing English diphthongs.
The difficulties are identified by errors made and explained based on the error
sources. The research is conducted in SMK Puspajati Buluspesantren. The data
are collected through recording the utterances made by the students. The students’
pronunciation were transcribed into phonetic transcription and then analyzed. The
test was given to 38 students.
The research finding indicates the 1458 or 76.74% of 1900 English
diphthongs produced by the students constitute error. The data analysis clarify
English diphthong [eə] are most frequently error, on the contrary English
diphthong [ɔI] is the least frequently in error. The diphthong errors are mostly
yielded by the interference errors, which comprise 85.32% of the errors, 10.29%
of them are interlingual errors and 4.39% by the developmental errors. The
teacher should have more awareness to their own English diphthong production
by producing them in the same quality of English sound and put aside their habit
of producing their L1 sound that can cause the negative transfer to the sound
quality.
