General Background of the Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 General Background of the Study

Pronunciation is one of the important aspects in speaking foreign language. The reason is pronunciation directly affects learners‟ communicative competence as well as their performance. Good pronunciation can increase learners‟ self- confidence and positively affect estimations of a speaker‟s credibility and ability; it also creates good impression to listeners. Meanwhile, poor pronunciation can restrict people to social interaction. In addition, poor pronunciation may cause misunderstanding in communication. There are so many cases that show us about this issue. For example, when you talk about your favourite meal you say that your favourite meal is “soup”. However, instead of saying [su:p] you pronounce [soup]. Small error like this creates big misunderstanding. That is why pronunciation is crucial in learning oral English. It is important than ever to focus in teaching pronunciation to EFL and the concern of building communicative competence. Teaching English to EFL students should be different from teaching English to ESL students or teaching English to native. This is because EFL students do not have the same amount of opportunity to get input or model in their daily life. They just get language model and input from school. In other word, the source comes from their teachers. 2 Unfortunately, the examples, especially in pronunciation, that given by the teacher, are sometimes incorrect. Making things worse, English pronunciation is different from Indonesian and it is difficult to predict. There are some sounds that are not familiar to Indonesian people. Indonesian learners may face some problems in pronouncing English sounds correctly because they never know about that sounds. Therefore, they just try to treat them same with the way when they pronounce them in Indonesian sounds. For example, the letter “u” in “cut” has a different sound compared to the letter “u” in “cuma”. The letter “u” in “cut” is pronounced as a central vowel [ʌ] in English, and the letter “u” in “cuma” is pronounced as a back vowel [u]. The other possibility is that they try to pronounce in the same way. For instance, they produce sounds [ʌ] for letter “u” in “purple” instead of sounds [ə:]. If we make such mistakes, it means we tend to deliver bad impression to others. Because of that reason, we should try to correct our pronunciation. Good pronunciation is a matter of habits. Changing our habits in pronouncing or producing different sounds is not an easy thing. We need practice more and more. Practice is needed to increase ability in producing English sounds that is different from Indonesian sounds. This ability depends on our speech organs. Unfortunately, our speech organs are not used to producing certain English sounds. In line with this, Ramelan 1999 pointed out that the movement of our speech organs has been set to produce the speech sounds of our mother language, and it will be difficult for us to change the habit of moving our speech organs to produce foreign sounds that we never know before. 3 For example, we can see in the research conducted by Fathoni 2010. From that research, we can see that eight grader students of junior high school found it difficult to pronounce English front vowels. Based on his research we can imply that we need to help students to learn pronunciation. Teaching pronunciation of a foreign language to Junior High School students, is not an easy thing. We should make a good environment in order to make the students used to pronouncing English words properly. There are many ways to make a good environment in learning English pronunciation. For instance, we can use some media like songs or Fidel Charts to attract students‟ attention. Because having good pronunciation is a matter of habits, it is reasonable to say that one of the suitable ways to improve pronunciation is by using Audio Lingual Method ALM. Audio lingual method is a method that focuses on drill. Drill is used as a way to form good habits in learning a new language. However, Audio Lingual Method is neglected nowadays. This is because this method is considered to be an old way in teaching. Even Philip Smith‟s study on 1965-1969 called the Pennsylvania Project considered Audio Lingual Method was less effective than a more traditional cognitive approach involving the learners first language. However, this critique is addressed to the use of ALM in teaching grammar to EFL students, not to teach pronunciation. Teaching pronunciation is different from teaching grammar. In teaching grammar to EFɝ students, the use of learners‟ first language is needed, but the use of le arners‟ first language habits in pronunciation is not. What we need in teaching pronunciation to EFL students is forming good habits. If good 4 habits have been formed, the goals of the teacher will be achieved. We know that one of the ALM goal is forming a good habit, while the other goal of ALM is to make students master the sound system of the foreign language and able to pronounce the target language accurately. Furthermore, ALM is employed to change the habits of the students‟ native language to interfere in learning the target language.

1.2 Reasons for Choosing the Topic