INTRODUCTION

Pronunciation Problems Among Primary School Pupils.

Nowadays, English language is so widely spoken and it has been referred as a
global language. Although, English is not the official language in many countries such
as Korea and Japan, it is the language that most often taught as a second language in
many countries including our country which is Malaysia. Moreover, English is the
primary language that used in international academic and business communities.
We as a Malaysian are known as non-native speakers of English often have
problems with pronunciation of vowel or consonants sounds. This is because most of us
started to learn English formally in primary school. Pronunciation problem occur starting
from primary school which became the reason why most Malaysian have speak broken
English because they are always used the wrong pronunciation of English words.
From my observation, I have identified many mistakes of pronunciation done by
the primary school students, but here I would like to discuss two of them including the
cause of those problems.
Problem 1 : Diphthong pronunciation problems
Many of the primary students have the difficulties in pronouncing diphthongs.
According to Kristn Denham (2010), diphthong is a sound made by gliding from one
vowel position to another. It means that diphthongs are represented phonetically by
sequences of two vowels, the first showing the starting point and the second indicating
the direction of movement. For example, some of the students cannot pronounce the
word sky as / ska /. They can pronounce the / / sound but they cannot glide and
moved into another vowel sound. Another example is most students pronounced the
word pay as /py/ instead of /pe/.

Problem 2 : Words with N pronunciation problem

Some students make a mistakes when pronouncing the word man as mang
which the phonetic symbol is / m/. Some of the students pronounce the word began
as /bg/ instead of /bgn/. Obviously they have difficulties to pronounce the nasal
consonant N. They preferred to sound ng // as the replacement of silent N. Another
example is the word rainbow which is pronounced as / reb/ instead of /renb/.
In oder to pronounce that word correctly, their tip of tongue should meet with alveolar
ridge to sound a proper /n/ that supposed to be uttered.
Cause of the problem
Based on my observation, the first problem which is diphthong pronunciation
problems are caused by the words that most students do not know that words contain
diphthongs and they do not know the kind of English sounds. Some students are lack of
vocabulary that caused them difficult to pronounce the unfamiliar words. Sometimes,
the words that they are pronounced are influenced by their mother tongue since most
students use their mother tongue widely in their daily life communication activity.
For the second problem, I have identified students have different Englishs accent
that influenced by their dialect. Under normal circumstances, some Malay speakers
speak Malay language using different accent depends on where they are live. This
problem is happening to Kelantanese whereas their English affected by their accent.
Based on my observation, when a Kelantanese speaks, there will be no /n/ sound at the
back of a word but // is always used as their choices in speaking. That is the reason
why some students from Kelantan and Terengganu find that are difficult to pronounce
words that contain /n/ sound.