Error Analysis of Silent Letters Pronounced by the TESOL 1 Class Students of English Major at UNKLAB

Abstract

This study investigated the silent letters errors in English pronunciation by the TESOL 1 Class students of English Major of UNKLAB. The objectives of this study were 1) to uncover the pronunciation errors made by the TESOL 1 Class students of UNKLAB, 2) to seek for the reasons that resulted in the errors, and 3) to find out the generally occurred errors in this issue. This study applied the theory proposed by Corder in Ellis (2008) about the stages of error analysis and the theory constructed Carney (2012) and Crystal (2012) regarding the silent letters. The study was carried out on the TESOL 1 Class students of Universitas Klabat. The participants were inquired to pronounce 40 English words containing various English silent letters in the initial, medial, and final positions of the words. The goal of this study was to analyze the pronunciation errors made by the students when pronouncing the English silent letters. The frequency of errors was measured in percentage. In this study, the researcher used descriptive qualitative method. The study proved that: 1) the participants mostly made post-systematic errors 2) the most frequent word that is mispronounced by the students are ‘knight’ in the initial position, and ‘would’ and ‘autumn’ in the medial and final positions. There were 108 errors made by the students with the percentage of 24.17%. Among the three positions of error occurrences, the medial position was found to be the most frequent category with 56% of error, 24% of error in the final position, and 19 % of error in the initial position. The participants’ inattentive and less of practices in pronouncing the words were discovered as the main cause of the errors.