Pronunciation Case Study

1.1 Background of the Study

One of the main goals of language teaching and learning process is to teach the students how to communicate in the target language appropriately. As the foreign language and the most learned target language, English has the same goal which for human communication. Due to this goal, the mastery of English becomes a priority to everyone especially the students. It can be seen by the rule of the curriculum that requires English becomes a subject that must be taught in school. Concerning on the curriculum, there are four skills in English that should be learned by the language students, they are: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Besides, there are three sub-skills that supporting those skills as pronunciation,

The term “pronunciation” itself used to wrap all aspect of how we employ speech sound in order to communicate (Schmitt, 2002). Pronunciation is not only about how the words said, but also refers to the sounds production that people use to make meaning. As well as Ramelan says, there are two features in English pronunciation. First, segmental features which consist of vowel and consonant. Second, supra-segmental features which consist of aspect of speech, such as intonation, phrasing, stress, timing, rhythm (AMEP,2012). When people doing communication with others, especially native speakers, they are not only should have to mastery the vocabulary and grammar but also good pronunciation. Even people mastery the whole grammar and thousands of vocabularies, but if they do not speak clearly then other people will not understand what they are talking about. Pronunciation is also important since people will judge someone’s background of education and social standing by the way that person

One of the most common problems that always faced by EFL students is they feel difficult in pronouncing English words. It is caused by many factors that make students are not interested when they learn pronunciation, such as: age factor, phonetic ability, lack of practice, motivation, personality or attitude and mother tongue. Consequently, EFL students at Senior High School 07 are not good in pronunciation. That is why it is very important to overcome the problems by applying drilling technique. Drilling technique is one of the ways that used in teaching English pronunciation that refers to behaviorist approach where the students are suggested to be familiar or used to the target language that they learn. In this technique, the students are emphasized to do more practices (adopted from Rodger and Richards: 1986: