Native Language Influence on the Production of English Sounds by Indonesian Students

ABSTRACT: EFL contexts with different L1 background learners of English cause the learners’ errors in learning pronunciation of English. Hence, this present study set out to investigation the pronunciation problems of Indonesian speakers. To achieve the goals of the study, 30 native speakers of Indonesian studying at Senior High School participated in the study. Their aged ranged from 15 to 22 years old. It must be emphasized that English as the participants’required subject in the school. The participants’pronunciation problems of English were elicited by mean of a pronunciation test that considered of a word list, short conversation, and reading aloud. All the items contained English consonants and vowels with potential pronunciation difficulties for Indonesian speakers of English. The data collection were transcribed and analyzed, and percentages and frequencies of pronunciation errors were computed. The results revealed that native speakers face problems in pronouncing certain English consonants, namely fricatives consonants /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /θ/ and /ð/ and tense English vowels /i:/ /ɜ:/, /ɑ:/, /ɔ:/, and /u:/. Theoretically, the findings give support to the idea of negative transfer as all of the errors. The findings are interpreted to have professional and pedagogical competences for EFL teachers and syllabus designers in general and for speakers of Indonesian, in particular.
KEYWORDS: Native language influence, production of English sounds, Indonesian students of English