Then, according to The Handbook of English Pronunciation, Pronunciation is
―central to language use in social, interactive context because pronunciation embodies the way that the speaker and the hearer work together to establish and
maintain common ground for producing and understanding each other’s utterances‖.
5
The last, based on The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to speakers of Other Languages,
pronunciation is ―the production and perception of the significant sounds of a particular language in order to achieve meaning in contexts
of language use‖.
6
It means pronunciationis part of language that used to receptive meaning of language.
From all definition above, the writer may conclude, pronunciation is a sound comes from vocal cords in the form of words or sentence that become one or
important unit in the language to convey meaning from the speaker, even it was neglected by learners.
2. Feature of Pronunciation
There are some features of pronunciation that can make the learners to avoid being misunderstood in learning pronunciation, such as kinds of error that most
likely to interfere with communication. This figure below will show the main feature of pronunciation.
7
There are phoneme and supra segmental. Phoneme divide into 2 parts: consonants, that consist of voiced and unvoiced, and vowels
that consist of single vowels short and long and diphthong. Furthermore, supra segmental consist of intonation and stress word stress and sentence stress. All of
this feature will explain above.
5
Marnie Reed and John M. Levis. The Handbook of English Pronunciation: First Edition. Oxford: John Wiley Sons, Inc, 2015, p. 353.
6
Ronals Carter and David Nunan. The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 56.
7
Gerald Kelly. How to Teach Pronunciation. England: Longman, 2000, p. 1.
Figure 2.1 Features of Pronunciation
Adapted from Gerald Kelly: How to Teach Pronunciation. 2000, p. 1
a. Phonemes
Phonemes are the unit of sound in a specific language that has different sound with the other language. Even people have differences in articulate sounds; we can
still describe how they produce the sounds.
8
Then, phonems which makes connection between sounds and meaning. Phonemes consist of two categories:
consonants and vowels. 1
Consonants Consonants are a speech sound that is not vowel. In this situation, change one
consonants with another is possible to make the communication breakdown than wrong vowel.
9
There are three kinds that distinguish in conconants: voice, tongue
8
Ibid.
9
Hewings, op. cit., p. 15.
