Keywords: Errors, Pronunciation, English Closing Diphthongs.
This paper studies the English closing diphthongs pronounced by English
Department students. The purpose of this study is to describe the English closing diphthongs
which are frequently mispronounced by the students and describe the most source of errors
that cause mispronounced sounds by English Department students batch 2016.
This study used descriptive-qualitative research in order to find out and describe the
research question of the study. Moreover, the researcher used questionnaire to classify the
subjects who acquire Banjarese as their native language and also used simple random
sampling technique in selecting the subjects of the study. Therefore, 25 students from English
Department students batch 2016 who acquired Banjarese as their native language had been
chosen to be the subjects. Additionally, the oral test is used to find out the data needed.
Finally, the researcher uses four steps to analyze the data: identifying, transcribing,
analyzing, and drawing the conclusion based on the comparison between the students’ first
language and the target language and also based on the students’ progress or development
from the three time oral tests.
The research results showed significant errors production that occurred from the oral
test. The largest or the most frequent mispronounced diphthong that happened in this research
is the diphthong /au/. There were 96 pronuncitiation errors made by the subjects. All the
subjects pronounced the diphthong /au/ into diphthong /ou/. Moreover, the subjects only
pronounced the words as they are written form, but the written letter is not consistent to be
pronounced. It sometimes represents more than one sound. It happened because in subjects’
native language system, they are disposed to pronounce the words as they are written, but it is
different with English, sometimes the word in English are different to pronounce the words
as they are written.