Segmental Pronunciation Errors Made by the Lamaholot Speakers of Junior High School Students

Abstract

This study is entitled Segmental Pronunciation Errors made by the Lamaholot Speakers of Junior High School Students. It aims at revealing how the pronunciation errors were made and investigating the factors that caused the errors. The data of this study were obtained from the Simak Libat Cakap by the use of bait questions conducted on 10 second-graders of a Junior High School in East Adonara district, East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia. The Simak Libat Cakap Method with the bait question was used to get how the students pronounced the basic English words. The observation method was used to observed the student's articulators. The documentation was used to gain some previous studies related to the phonological contrastive analysis between the Lamaholot language and English. The data of the study were qualitatively analyzed based on three branches of phonetic theory by Crystal (2008) and the factors causing errors by Brown (2000). The analysis of this study was presented in formal and informal method, each problem in this study was descriptively presented. The finding revealed that the students tended to make errors in pronouncing the consonants rather than any vowels. Those consonants pronunciation errors were consistently made by the Lamaholot speakers, which were [v], [?], [ð], [?], [?], [z]. These consonants have not existed in the phonetic chart of the Lamaholot language. Moreover, the speakers also consistently did not pronounce the [p] and [d] in the case of consonant clusters distributed in word-final distribution, which are not recognized in the Lamaholot syllable structure.