An Aoustic Analysis of Chinese Indonesian Students in Pronouncing English Vowels: A Praat Study

Abstract

This research analyze the errors made by Chines-Indonesian students of the English Department of University of Sumatera Utara in pronouncing English vowels; to discuss the reason for those errors, this research applied Richard’s theory on causes of pronunciation errors; and to overcome those errors using the phonetics transcription method and repetition drills. This research analyzes the acoustic phonetics of phonemes using the Praat software. This research is qualitative and quantitative as well. The data of this research are voice recordings of the samples and native speakers and the questionnaire answers of the samples. It is found that the Chinese Indonesian students of English Department who have passed the phonology subject still produce errors in pronouncing English vowels. It is concluded that these errors are found due to the effect of their mother tongues, namely Hokkian-Indonesian. The errors are also caused by the samples’ intralingual and developmental errors. In order to overcome those errors, this research employed the phonetic transcriptions method and repetition drills, and found that the methods improve the overall values of selected English vowel phonemes