PROBLEMATIC ENGLISH SEGMENTAL SOUNDS: EVIDENCE FROM INDONESIAN LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

Abstract

Difficulty in producing natural English sounds by Indonesian learners of English is due to the
divergence in manner of producing the sounds in English and Indonesia and resulted in unnatural
pronunciation of the English sounds. This research addresses the issue of English sound production
with special attention to segmental sounds produced by Indonesian learners of English. Descriptive
method was used to explain the data collected from picture description task and interview. The study
was divided into two: 1) an in-depth phonetic analysis of the students’ sounds production in terms of
place of articulation, manner of articulation and distinctive features for the production of English
consonant sounds, and openness of mouth, tongue elevation, position of tongue elevation, lips’
shapes, and length of vocalization for the production of the English vowel sounds and 2) detailed
explanation about the contributory factors to the production of segmental sounds quality in terms of
unnatural performance and unnatural competence. The findings of this research denoted that the most
to least frequent problematic sounds produced by the student occur in [ð] voiced dental fricative
(38.15%) for consonant sound and [ӕ] Lax Low Front Unrounded (38.46%) for vowel sound. The
most potential influential factors to the problematic English sounds production are the learners’
mother language interference and the less practice of speaking English. Both are indicators of
unnatural performance.