PRONUNCIATON ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH CONSONANTS /θ/ AND /ð/ BY ENGLISH DEPARTMENT STUDENTS

Abstract

Indonesians have been taking much concern in English since it has been
applied in formal education curricula. Also, not all Indonesians are familiar
with English pronunciation, especially its characteristics in phonemes.
Some English consonants even do not exist in Indonesian consonants such
as the sounds /θ/ and /ð/ categorized as voiceless and voiced interdental
fricatives. Due to this concern, this study investigates the production of
English voiced and voiceless interdental consonants uttered by English
Department students as non-native speakers of English using the Praat
application to see their pronunciation and spectrogram analysis. There
were eight undergraduate first-year English major students as the
respondents. The researcher gave them eighteen words consisting of /θ/ and
/ð/ sounds in initial, medial, and final word-position. The data are in audio
recordings. The result revealed that most students changed the voiced
interdental fricative into consonants such as /d/ and /t/. This inappropriate
way also happened when they produced voiceless interdental fricatives.
They changed /θ/ sound into consonant sounds such as /d/ and /t/.