Improving Students' Pronunciation Through Phonetic Transcription and Prosody Pyramid at The Forth Semester Students of English Letters Departement of Pamulang University

anderson, roy; dr. santi c. djonhar, matesol; siti zulaiha, m.a, ph.d;

For EFL students, mastering English is something challenging since English is different from their mother tongue. There are several problems which they face in learning English. One of the most crucial problems is pronunciation. It is because in English there is no relationship between the spelling of the word and the way it must be pronounced. Hence, appropriate teaching methods are needed to help the students to improve their pronunciation. This thesis entitled Improving students’ pronunciation through phonetic transcription and Prosody Pyramid at the forth semester students of English Letters Department of Pamulang University. It was written to reveal if the utilization of phonetic transcription and Prosody Pyramid were able to improve the students’ pronunciation. It was also written to figure out how phonetic transcription and Prosody Pyramid improve the students’ pronunciation. Moreover, figuring the problems which were faced by the students in learning pronunciation through phonetic transcription and Prosody Pyramid was also the objective of this thesis. This Classroom Action Research which was carried out from June until August 2017 was conducted at Pamulang University. The subjects were the forth semester students of English Letters Department of Pamulang University. The writer who was the active participant lecture conducted the study in three cycles in which there were three meetings in each cycles. The procedures of the study were planning the action, implementing the action, observing the action and reflecting the result. In collecting the data, the writer used field note, interview and test. The results of the study showed that phonetic transcription and Prosody Pyramid were able to improve the students’ pronunciation. Phonetic transcription had role in improving segmental features of the students’ pronunciation while Prosody Pyramid focused on supra segmental features. Thus, the combination of phonetic transcription and Prosody Pyramid were able to improve the students’ pronunciation both segmental and supra segmental features. Besides, the results of the study also revealed the problems which were faced by the students in learning pronunciation through phonetic transcription and Prosody Pyramid. The problems were the difficulty in memorizing the phonetic symbols and determining the focus word.