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clearly and can be understood, so what the speaker wanted from the hearer can be received as its purpose.
According to those definitions, the writer concludes that pronunciation is the way of a person in which a word or language sounded and uttered and
one of the people‟s ways in pronouncing, uttering, even in communicating a language to deliver someone‟s desire in communication, so that the
communication is hopefully more clear and understandable.
2. The Concepts of Pronunciation
Pronunciation is not just a word that has the meaning how people pronounce or utter a word or sentence in language, but it has some aspects that
explain the ways in pronouncing the word that will be understandable in spoken language.
Ur 1996 stated “three concepts of pronunciation, those are: the sounds of the language or phonology, stress and rhythm, and intonation.”
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a. The sounds of language
Sounds of language or phonology, which is the symbols of language, heard which is produced by the organs of speech.
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English language has the numbers of sounds which produced by organs of speech.
Those sounds are classified in two categories, vowel and consonants. Avery an
d Erlich 2009 noted, “Consonants involve a narrowing in the mouth which in turn causes some obstruction of the airstreams. With
vowels, air passes rather freely through the mouth because there is very little narrowing”.
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It seems when people producing consonants are signed by the activity of the mouth narrows, there is pressing on the throat or
mouth when the word produced. On the other side vowel is produced
12
Penny Ur, a Course in …, p.47
13
Daniel Jones, The Pronunciation of English, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p.11
14
Peter Avery and Susan Erlich, Teaching American English Pronunciation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p.12
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freely, there is no obstruction when it is produced, even it is produced smoothly without any hard effort to produce it.
In addition, Murcia, et. al 2009 presented “one of the best ways
to appreciate the difference between voiced and unvoiced is to put your hand against your Adam‟s apple i.e. larynx.”
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Somehow, it is one of the familiar ways to recognize the production of consonants. Here is the
terminology of voice and unvoiced. These are to differentiate the
consonants sounds when it is produced. “If the vocal folds are held gently together and air under pressure from the lungs is pushed between them, the
folds can be made to vibrate evenly to produce the tone we call voiced
.”
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So, when people produce voice sounds, their vocal folds vocal cords in older terminology could be vibrated whilst unvoicedvoiceless not. For
example: f vs v. We could feel the difference between them, it could be light when we produce f sound and there is no vibrationunvoiced. On the
other side, v is produced by vibration on vocal folds and there is a pressure of the lungs when the air flows.
Then, vowel can be classified based on its sounds. According to Kelly 2000, there are two kinds of vowel sounds, single vowel and
diphthong that is involving a movement from one vowel sound to another like ei, as in late. Single vowel sounds may be short like i, as in hit
or long like i:, as in heat. The symbol : denotes a long sound.
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It showed that single vowel sound is vowel that appeared one morpheme in a
word or when it sounded, which diphthong consists of the combination of two different sounds, and monophthongs are more than two morphemes
combined in one sound or they are produced equally.
15
Marianne Celce-Murcia, et. al. Teaching Pronunciation: a Reference for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, P.42
16
Michael Arshby and John Maidment, Introducing Phonetic Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp.22-23
17
Gerald Kelly, How to Teach Pronunciation, England: Pearson Education Limited, 2000, Series Editor: Jeremy Harmer, p.84
