The production and perception of English monophthongs by acehnese speakers / Tanzir Masykar

• Main Author: Tanzir , Masykar
• Format: Thesis
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: P Philology. Linguistics; PE English
• Online Access: http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/15254/2/Tanzir.pdf; http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/15254/1/Tanzir_Masykar.pdf; http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/15254/

English is the only foreign language made as a compulsory subject from junior to senior high school in the Indonesian school curriculum. Some private schools also promote the use of English outside school hours. One such school system is the Islamic boarding high schools in Aceh, which require students to speak in English with their peers, seniors and teachers during their three years stay at the school. The rationale for the use of English is to improve the English language fluency of the students. However, to date, there is a lack of published studies on the English sounds produced by the students. To begin filling this gap, the present study investigated the production and perception of English monophthongs by Acehnese Indonesian speakers from one Islamic boarding school in Aceh. A total of 29 Islamic boarding high school students participated in the study. Two types of data were collected: (i) the production of English, Acehnese, and Bahasa Indonesia monophthongs, and (ii) the perception of English vowel contrast. For the production data, students produced English, Acehnese and Bahasa Indonesia monophthongs embedded in target words placed in a carrier sentence. For the perception data, students completed the AX, ABX and FCI tests of English vowel contrast with the audio stimuli provided by an American English speaker. The findings revealed that the quality of English monophthongs produced by the speakers were similar to Acehnese Indonesian speakers reported in a previous study from public non-boarding schools. Second, the speakers tended not to contrast typical vowel pairs in terms of quality. Third, three types of assimilation were found, full assimilation, partial assimilation and mixed assimilation. Fourth, the perception accuracy of each vowel pair was found to be task dependent. Their discrimination score was mostly higher in the ABX, followed by the AX and FCI tests. Finally, their ability to discriminate English vowel pairs in the perception test was assisted not by their assimilation of English vowels to Acehnese and vowels as suggested by speech learning models such as Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) and Second Language Linguistic Perception (L2LP). Instead, the cues they heard from the audio stimuli assisted their ability to discriminate the vowel contrasts.