CHAPTER
I
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
Every
human being has a language. It is used to convey messages to other people and
without a language the people will find it difficult to communicate and express
their ideas, thought and wishes. According to Finocchiaro (1974: 3), “Language
is a system of arbitrary, vocal symbols, which permit all people in a given
culture, or other people who have
learned the system of that culture, to communicate or to interact.”
In Indonesia, people speak Indonesian as their second language to communicate
with anyone (Indonesian) whatever his first
language he speaks (Javanese, Madurese, Sundanese, etc), but when they
want to speak to other people coming from other countries, they cannot use
Indonesian as a means of communication. English is a way to solve the miscommunication between Indonesian
and people from other countries since English is used as an international
language.
The
Indonesian government has chosen English as the first foreign language. It
means that it is taught in all educational institutions at all levels from elementary
school up to university. Besides, as stated above English is used as lingua
franca, as it is an international language used in many countries throughout the
world. For this reason, millions of Indonesian students want to learn English in
order to be able to speak English. When learning a new language, anyone studies
the components of language.
Language
has three major components including phonology, vocabulary, and grammar (Nasr,
1980: 2). Language is primarily spoken; therefore the sounds are very
important. In this relation, phonology takes an important role. According to
Ramelan (1994: 1), phonology is the study of phones or speech sounds. There are
two studies of phonology, phonetics and phonemics. Phonemics is the study of
speech sounds with a view to finding out the significant units of sounds in a
given language. Phonetics is the study of speech sounds as sounds, without
regard to their function as signalling units of language.
Phonetics
is divided into two kinds, namely Articulatory Phonetics and Acoustic
Phonetics. Articulatory phonetics studies speech sounds from the point of view
of their ways of production by the speech organs. Articulatory phonetics explains
the suprasegmental and segmental features. Suprasegmental features, which refer
to such feature as stress, pitch, length, intonation, and other features, always
accompany the production of segmental. Segmental features refer to sound units
arranged in a sequential order. Segmental features consist of vowels and
consonants, diphthongs and their distribution.
Pronunciation
plays an important role in learning a
second or a foreign language. Although students have English subject at school,
most of them often make errors, for example: in listening, speaking, reading,
and writing. The writer explained before that language has three major
components including phonology, vocabulary, and grammar. Among these components, phonology takes an important
role. Automatically, phonology relates
with pronunciation. So, the?????????????????????????????????????
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