THE ERRORS OF ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION IN LEARNING ENGLISH PRODUCED BY STUDENTS OF AL-IZZAH ISLAMIC BOARDING SCHOOL

Abstract

Pronunciation is one of the important skills that should be mastered by English foreign learners like Indonesian. If the learners have poor pronunciation, their speaking will not be understood by the listeners. Moreover, they will fail in English communication. To get successful communication, learners should have accurate and intelligible English pronunciation in order that the speakers and listeners can understand each other. This study was conducted to analyze the errors of English pronunciation in learning English produced by the students of Al-Izzah International Islamic Boarding School and to know the possible causes of pronunciation errors. The design used by the researcher was descriptive qualitative research.
 
 The subjects of this study were 30 second grade students of International class in SMP al-Izzah Islamic Boarding School, Batu-Malang. The instruments used to collect the data were pronunciation test, questionnaire and interview. The data were analyzed by finding the pronunciation errors of the students. The data showed that there were three errors produced by the subjects of the study. Those errors were classified as the errors of vowel, diphthong, and consonant.
 
 The second result of the study showed the possible causes of pronunciaion errors: that the difference between mother tongue and the target language, mother tongue interference, a lack of cognitive skill, a lack of pronunciation instructions, the students feel psychological barriers, the students have never been tought the phonological system of English. In addition, some factors also became the causes of studentsÂ’ pronunciation errors, such as; the students are not used to listening the English words, the students have no good environment to practice their English and they had less media to practice their pronunciation, the students are not interested in English.