CHAPTER II
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
Analyzing problem needs theories to support and to find the data that will be observed. This chapter discusses about some theories that will be used by the researcher. Dealing with language, there are many problems that should be researched in the field to gain more knowledge. Language, society, and culture are inseparable. Based on those aspects, appears dialect which marks the owner of the language geographically. In this case, the researcher needs some theories to analyze and observe that kind of problem, namely phonology, contrastive analysis, and error analysis. In addition, this chapter also reviews the relevant theories done by other researchers in the same aspects of pronunciation errors. One of them done by Hassan (2014) entitled “Pronunciation Problems: A Case Study of English Language Students at Sudan University of Science and Technology”. Essentially, those theories mentioned are as tools for the researcher to analyze the researcher’s object.
B.1. Theoretical Framework
B.1.1. Phonology
(Forel and Puskas, 2005:3). While Dardjowidjodjo (2009:14) stated that phonology discusses about how the sounds are realized and arranged when used in actual speech. For instance, the vowel [ɔ] as in gone is phonetically speaking in oral sound. The word views from phonology point of view; the sound is nasalized when followed by nasal such as [n]. In other word, the vowel becomes nasalized [o] in the sound system of English.
Phonology also discusses the arrangement of sounds to form a syllable or a word. English and some regional dialects in Indonesia have the sounds [l] and [p]. In English, the sounds [l] and [p] can occur together in one syllable such as help, sculp, the same aspect of the example is film. As Indonesian does not have that kind of sounds, Indonesian English learners sometimes pronounce the sounds as [helep] and [filem]. Meanwhile, the sound [ŋ] as in sing, king never occurs in the beginning of a syllable such as ngintip, ngomel, ngopi in Javanese.
phonology studies the sound system of language (Dardjowodjodjo, 2009: 16). Also, Catford (1992:187) stated that phonology studies how sounds are organized into systems and utilized in languages. Phonology deals with phonetics, hence, when the topic is the attempt to learn the phonology of a particular foreign language, many of the phonetic dynamics of the mother tongue have to be sidelined (Bardakci, 2015).
B.1.2. Phoneme
consonants, Javanese has 21 consonants, Sundanese has 20 consonants, and Thai has 44 consonants. Well, let’s see such phonemes.
B.1.2.2. Javanese consonant phonemes
Javanese has 21 consonant phonemes. Javanese “voiced” phonemes are not really voiced but voiceless with breathy voice on the following vowel. Here is the chart of Javenese consonant phonemes.
Place Manner
Bilabial Labiodental Dental/Alveolar Retrofleks Palatal Velar Glottal
Stop Voiced b d ʠ j G
Voiceless p t ʈ c K ʔ
Fricative Voiced v* z*
Voiceless f* S ʃ** X h
Nasal Voiced m N ɲ ɳ
Approximant Voiced R
Lateral Voiced L
Semivowel Voiced w y
(Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanese_language)
B.1.2.3. Sundanese Consonant Phonemes
Final Consonants
Futhermore, Thai also has 11 consonant clusters, namely: /kr/ (กร), /kl/ (กล), /kw/ (กว)
/kʰr/ (ขร,คร), /kʰl/ (ขล,คล), /kʰw/ (ขว,คว) /pr/ (ปร), /pl/ (ปล)
The number of clusters increases when a few more combinations are presented in loanwords such as /tʰr/ (ทร) in อินทรา (/intʰraː/, from Sanskrit indrā) or /fr/ (ฟร) in ฟรี (/friː/, from English free); however, it can be observed that Thai language supports only those in initial position, with either /r/, /l/, or /w/ as the second consonant sound and no more than two sounds at a time. (Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_language)
English /ɪŋglɪʃ/ [ɪŋglɪtʃ] Substitution of [ʃ] as [tʃ] First /fɜ:st/ [fɜ:tʃ] Substitution of [st] as [tʃ]
Book /bʊk/ [pʊk] Substitution of [b] as [p]
Join /dʒɔɪn/ [tʃɔɪn] Substitution of [dʒ] as [tʃ]
Size /saɪz/ [saɪ] Addition of [z]
Provide /prə'vaɪd/ [prə'vaɪ] Omission of [d] Archive /ɑ:kaɪv/ [ɑ:kaɪp] Substitution of [v] as [p]
Ask /ɑ:sk/ [ɑ:k] Omission of [s]
Ship /ʃɪp/ [sɪp] Substitution of [ʃ] as [s]
Thy /ðaI/ [θaI] Substitution of [ð] as [θ]
There /ðeə(r)/ [deə(r)] Substitution of [ð] as [d]
Ruth /ruθ/ [rut] Substitution of [θ] as [d]
Live /laɪv/ [laɪf] Substitution of [v] as [f]
Verve /vɜ:rv/ [vɜ:rp] Substitution of [v] as [p] Ache /eɪk/ [eɪtʃ] Substitution of [k] as [tʃ]
B.1.3. Phonetics
production by the speech organs. While Accoustic Phonetics studies speech sounds from the point of view of their physical attributes, and deals among others by measuring the loudness, pitches, and other natural characteristics of sounds. While, Catford (1992:187) stated that Phonetics is the study of the physiological, aerodynamic, and acoustic characteristics of speech-sounds. Each language has its own speech sounds and speech organs. This research only focuses on English phonetics that deals with the ways of producing English speech sounds, means it is Articulatory Phonetics. It does not make use of expensive electronic instruments, and only relies on the kinesthetic sense of the students.
B.1.3.1. IPA English Consonant Chart
(Oxford Advanced Learner Dictionary, 2006:311). Based on the chart above, IPA English consonant chart has three parts, namely place of articulation, manner, and voicing. Place of articulation is the place where the air flow will be more or less obstructed. While, manner is concerned with the nature of obstruction. The last, voicing means that the vocal cords are used named voiced; if they are not, the voice is voiceless (Puskas & Forel, 2005:7).
B.1.3.2. Place of Articulation
1. Bilabial: sounds are produced when the lips are brought together, for example [p], which is voiceless, as in pay or [b] and [m] which are voiced, as in buy and may.
2. Labiodental: sounds are made when the lower lip is raised towards the upper front teeth, for example [f] as in safe (voiceless) and [v] as in voiced (voiced). 3. Dental: sounds are produced by touching the upper front teeth with the tip
of the tongue. Examples are [θ] as in oath (voiceless) and [ð] as in clothe (voiced).
5. Palato Alveolar: sounds are made by raising the blade of the tongue towards the part of the palate just behind the alveolar ridge. Examples are [ʃ, tʃ] as in pressure, batch (voiceless) and [ʒ, dʒ ] as in pleasure, badge (voiced).
6. Palatal: sounds are very similar to palatoalveolar, they are just produced further back towards the velum. The only palatal sound in English is [j] as in yes, yellow, beauty, new (voiced)
7. Velar: sounds are made by raising the back of the tongue towards the soft palate called the velum. Examples are [k] as in back (voiceless), [g, ] as in bag, bang (voiced), and [w] is a velar which is accompanied with lip rounding. 8. Glottal: sounds are produced when the air passes through the glottis as it is narrowed: [h] as in high.
B.1.3.3. Manner of Articulation
1. Plosive: sounds in which there is a complete closure in the mouth, so that the air is blocked for a fraction of a second and then released with a small burst of sound. Plosive has bilabial [p, b] as in park, bark, alveolar [t, d] as in tar, dark, velar [k, g] as in car, guard.
breathe, alveolar [s, z] as in sink, zinc, palato-alveolar [ʃ, ʒ] as in nation, evasion, glottal [h] as in help.
3. Affricative: a combination of plosive and fricative, sometimes it is called as “affricated plosives”. Affricative begins like a plosive with a complete closure, but instead of a plosion they have slow release, moving backwards to a place where a friction can be heard. Affricative only has palato alveolar [tʃ] which is voiceless as in chin, rich, and [dʒ] which is voiced as in gin, ridge.
4. Nasal: it has a complete closure in the mouth, but as the velum is lowered the air can escape through the nasal cavity. Nasal has three places of articulation are all voiced. It is bilabial [m] as in ram, alveolar [n] as in ran, and velar [ŋ] as in rang.
5. Lateral: sounds where the air escapes around the sides of the tongue. There is only one lateral in English [l] which is voiced lateral. The sounds have two versions namely “clear l” occurs before vowels, as in light, long, and “dark l”
as in milk, ball. The symbol of “dark l” is usully written as [ɫ]. “Clear l” is pronounced with the top of the tongue raised, whereas “dark l” is
pronounced with the back of the tongue raised. Even though “clear l” and “dark l” are phonetically different, they cannot be said to be different sounds from the point of view of how the function in the sound system.
three approximants which are all voiced, those are, alveolar [r] as in right, brown, sometimes it is called as palato alveolar, and the other alveolar sounds are [t, d, s, l]. Besides, palatal approximant [j] as in use, youth, and velar approximant [w] as in why, twin, square.
B.1.4. Language Interference (L1 interference to L2)
Nowadays, the existence of English is so important for societies. Even though English occupies on the second international language after Mandarin, yet, it is really needed for communicating to other people in cross language/country. Even, Crystal (2003: 61) estimated the number of English speakers worldwide between 1.1 billion and 1.8 billion, and only 320 to 380 million of English native speakers. The number of English speakers lead to vary pronunciation influenced by the speakers’ dialects or mother tongues. Learning English is as a foreign required hard work to master the pronunciation fluency. Interference also affects vocabulary, diction, accent, and pronunciation. Nevertheless, First language (L1) often influences the way of people speak in second or foreign language (L2). In addition, the L1 speakers often utter pronunciation varieties, phonetic process, phonological process, and grammatical features. In this case, this kind of error in pronouncing L2 which is influenced by L2 called language interference.
using certain language utterances to another language that covers pronunciation, structure, and vocabularies. Meanwhile, Jendra (1991:109) proposed many language aspects that contribute interference i.e. phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and semantics (in Suwito, 1985:55). Dulay, et al (1982) defines interference as the automatic transfer is caused by the habit of the surface structure of the first language onto the surface of the target language. Lott (1983: 256) defines interference as ‘errors in the learner’s use of the foreign language that can be traced back to the mother tongue’. According to Nababan (1984), interference takes place when usual utterances of mother language or dialect of certain language appear while a person is using other language. Interference is a big symptom to break a language. The grammatical and structural errors make a language become inappropriate with the source language.
In addition, Indonesian English learners often mispronounce English sounds. For instance, Sundanese often has slip-tongue in pronouncing allophone /f/, /v/, /p/. The learners have difficulties in producing sounds that are similar to their first language sounds (Bohn & Flege, 1992; Trofimovich et al,, 2007). Also, Trask (1996) stated that Imperfections in the use of one language is a result of the influence of another language, such as a ‘foreign accent’ in speaking a second/foreign language.
In addition, Eltrug (1984) in Yiing (2011) affirmed that mother tongue interference can contribute to a large number of mispronunciation made by students. Therefore, Jendra (2010:95) cited Brown (1994) and Hartman and Stork (1972), that:
It has been common in second language teaching to stress the role of interference-that is, the interfering effects of the native language on the target (the second) language. It is of course not surprising that this process has been singled out, for native-language interference is surely the most immediately noticeable source of error among second language learners…Interference of the first language in the second is simply a form of generalizing prior first language experiences and applies them incorrectly. (Brown, 1994)
(Interferences are) the errors by carrying over the speech habits of the native language or dialect into a second language or dialect.
(Hartman and Stork, 1972)
B.1.5. Language Variation
social network are dimensions that influence language variation (Holmes, 2008, 127). Nowadays with the language development, everyone has his/her own style to express a language because everyone knows that language is variable (Sapir, 1921:147). Sometimes speakers use different pronunciation for a word and do not realize that they change the meaning. On the other hand, some speakers use pronunciation for language style without changing the meaning. In order to meet communication needs, a person may alternate between different pronunciation of a word (interspeaker variation), or different ways of ordering elements in a sentence in different circumtances (intraspeaker variation) (Meyerhoff, 2009:203).
Chomsky (2005:6) in Yang (2009:1160) outlines three factors of language variation:
b. Genetic endowment: environment as linguistic experience c. Experience: within a fairly narrow range which leads to variation
d. Principles: principles of data analysis that might be used in language acquisition or other domains, and principles of structural architecture and developmental contrains, including principles of efficient computation.
The speakers of any language have variation in the way that they use their languages. This variation is demonstrated by linguistic differences in terms of sound (phonetics) and structure (grammar). However, in this research, the researcher will focus on linguistic differences in terms of sounds / pronunciation only. There might be only slight variations between forms of a language, such as minor pronunciations of words. Sometimes there are differences between the speech of men and women, different social classes, and differences between age groups. Some of these differences may impede intelligibility and intergroup communication. Ramelan (1994:2) states that the differences of pronunciation among the speakers are caused by geographical, social, and historical factors; or they may also be caused by individual pecularities such as stuttering, lipsing, or other speech deficiences.
understood since childhood he has been speaking his mother tongue. The movements of their speech organs have been set to produce their speech sounds of their mother tongue; of cource, it will be difficult for them to change their habits of moving their speech organns in such a way in producing the foreign language sounds. Furthermore, Ramelan (1994:5) classifies the reason of pronunciation difficulty in learning foreign language.
a. The difficulty encountered by the student in learning foreign language is caused by the different elements which are found in his mother tongue and target language.
b. The learning problem may be caused by the sounds which have the same phonetic features in both languages but different in their distributions. c. The source of difficulty is also caused by similar sounds in both languages
which have different variants or allophones.
d. The last, The difficulty may be caused by similar sounds in both languages which differ only slightly in their phonetic features.
and greater ones from distant varieties. Regional dialect is one of factors causes phonological variants, so that phonological variants are fairly salient as markers of regional dialect. Rickford (2002:1) mentions that one relevant aspect of phonological variation worth noting that it is often conditioned by the phonological environment--that is, by where in a utterance (word-initially, word-finally, and so on) the sound occurs. Consonant loss happens to English learners, for example in pronouncing told with loss of final [d] become tol.
B.1.6. Contrastive Analysis
Contrastive analysis (CA) was pioneered by Charles C. Fries (1945) assumed that the errors causes by the different elements between native and target language. Furthermore, CA is expanded by Robert Lado (1957). According to Khalilzadeh (2014:5), contrastive analysis is a systematic and synchronic comparison of two or more languages aim to establish similarities and differences between them. CA was extensively used in 1960s and early 1970s as a method of explaining why some features of target language were more difficult to acquire than others. According to behaviorist, language learning is a question of habit formation, and this could be reinforced by existing habits. Therefore, the difficulties in mastering certain structures of second language (SL) depend on the difference between the learner’s
The theoretical foundation of Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis were formulated in Lado's Linguistics across Cultures (1957). In this book, Lado claimed that “those elements which are similar to the learner’s native language will be simple for him, and those elements that are different will be difficult”. The goals of
Contrastive Analysis can be stated as follows: to make foreign language teaching more effective, to find out the differences between the first language and the target language based on the assumptions that: (1) foreign language learning is based on the mother tongue, (2) similarities facilitate learning (positive transfer), (3) differences cause problems (negative transfer/interference), (3) via contrastive analysis, problems can be predicted and considered in the data. Nevertheless, not all problems predicted by contrastive analysis always appear to be difficult for the students (Rustipa, 2011).
Eltrug (1984) in Yiing (2011) states that mother tongue interference can contribute to large number of pronunciation errors made by students. CA focuses on differences between L1 and L2 and ignore factors which may affect the second language learner’s performance such as his learning and communication strategies,
part of the languages was selected for analysis, such as segments (consonant and vowels). Third, the two systems were then compared. Areas of differences were sorted out. Finally, areas of the difficulty were predicted. It is the traditional starting point for conducting CA, then elements that are missing from the second/foreign language will be assumed to cause difficulty (Archibald, 1998).
B.2. Review of Related Researches
The formants are /qof/, /dzho/, /kho/, /ghoin/, /cha/, /’ain/, /ha/ which consider as the difficult of Standard Arabic to pronounce among Malaysian children.
A research deals with pronunciation also done by Bardakci entitled “Turkish EFL Pre-Service Teachers’ Pronunciation Problems” in 2015. The researcher analyzed the level of proficiency in English. The participants of this study consist of 22 pre-service language teachers. Most of the participants were fresh students who had completed and intense English preparatory program. The proficiency levels were tested through a multiple choice diagnostic test (Allen, 1990). The technique of collecting data, the researcher provided 120 items of English words and 50 words contain phoneme schwa /ə/ which is the sound that commonly mispronounced phoneme among others. As the result, phoneme schwa /ə/ is the sound that commonly mispronounced phoneme among others because of its orthographic variety, for example in “america” pronounced as /ʌmerikʌ/ while the correct on is /əmerikə/, “area” pronounced as /area/ while the correct one is /eriə/. The respondents also have difficulty in pronouncing phonemes /θ/, /ŋ/, and /æ/. In addition the vowel /ʌ/ in Turkish is quite similar to /ə/ in terms of both manner and place of articulation. Also, sounds /θ/ and /ð/ are very low in frequency and certainly it causes mispronunciation.
Language (Turkish EFL Learners)” in 2014. The researcher investigated the
