Understanding Pronunciation Variations of Javanese Students of English

Abstract

Indonesia has many languages, as noted in kompasiana.com at 2015 by Nasir, Indonesia has 749 region languages and each language has specific characters that surely make Indonesia full of students with multiple backgrounds of languages, it is clear that ESL students in Indonesia have diversity in their pronunciation. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to describe the diversity of pronunciation which analyze in phonetics and why the diversity exists, with focus on ESL students’ major problems in articulating (θ), (ð), (ʃ), (ʒ), (ʧ), (ʤ), that phonemes are pronounced by ESL students in Cilacap, Central Java. In this paper, the writer gives another point of view, this paper is not discusses in the term of error analysis or contrastive analysis in pronunciation but it discusses in the term of interlanguage, Selinker (1972) referred interlanguage as second language systematic knowledge independent of both first language and second language (Fauziati, 2011). Therefore, their mistake is not taken as mistake but as progress when ESL students learn the second language.