AN ERROR ANALYSIS ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF DIPHTHONG MADE BY THE STUDENTS OF THE FIRST GRADE IN SMK PUSPAJATI BULUSPESANTREN KEBUMEN IN THE ACADEMIC YEAR 2012/2013

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.