ABSTRACT
This final project is a descriptive quantitative study. This study was conducted under the consideration that Indonesian does not have certain fricatives. Therefore, it is possible that the students find it difficult to pronounce the words containing fricative sounds. The objective of this study is to know the Aswaja Conversation Club (ACC) members’ mastery in pronouncing English fricative sounds and the possible factors that may influence their mastery in pronouncing those sounds.
The population of this study is 30 students who join Aswaja Conversation Club in Pondok Pesantren Durrotu Ahlussunnah Waljama’ah Sekaran, Gunungpati, Semarang. The writer took all the population as the sample or known as total sampling method. It is because the number is below 100. In this study, the writer proposes an assumption that there were problems for ACC members in pronouncing English fricative consonants. However, he assumed that they can express English utterances orally in conversation meetings of ACC including those fricatives.
To get the data, the writer administered a pronunciation test. He made 25 items containing 50 fricative sounds. Each respondent was given the test sheet and asked to pronounce all the sentences and their pronunciations were recorded using a tape recorder. The result of the recording was analyzed by the writer with the help of two raters. In this way, the raw score was found.
After the data was computated and analyzed, it is found out that the mean score of the test is 60.40%. This study confirms the proposed assumption that there are some problems faced by the respondents in pronouncing English fricatives. Most of them found difficulties in pronouncing [ _ ] (17.14% correct), [ v ] (25.33% correct), [ _ ] (45.24% correct), and [ _ ] (44.29% correct).
Therefore, the working assumption was accepted. It means that most of the ACC members have problems in pronouncing English fricatives that may be caused by the different elements between the native language and the foreign language. In this case, it is better for the students to improve their pronunciation more and more. Moreover, the tutors and teachers should give attention intensively to the students’ pronunciation, especially in fricative sounds.
