The Influences of Tongue Twister in Teaching Pronunciation of Aspirated Sound [ph]

Abstract

Speaking English for Indonesian students needs more than an effort to master as they cannot produce intelligibly pronunciation. Besides, their mother tongue interferes them when there is different sound production between Indonesian and English; hence, they have difficulty in pronouncing aspirated sound that does not exist in Indonesian. This study aims to find out how Indonesian students pronounce aspirated sound [ph] and the influences of tongue twister to teach pronunciation of aspirated sound [ph]. This research uses pre-test post-test quasi-experimental design. The data were collected from the result of pronunciation tests of seventh graders of SMP Negeri 12 Magelang in academic year 2016/2017. The findings showed that students mispronounced [ph] into /p/ as what they had in Indonesian. Afterbeing taught with tongue twister, the mean score of experiment group increased from 13.28 to 50.16. There was significant difference of the ability between students who were taught pronunciation using tongue twister and those who were not. The t-test result was 0.000 sig 5%; it means there was different ability between control and experiment group after receiving the treatment. Based on the result, the researcher concluded that tongue twister helps Indonesian students to improve their pronunciation of aspirated sound [ph].

Keywords

• aspirated sound
• pronunciation
• tongue twister