AN ERROR ANALYSIS OF SYLLABLE STRESS IN THE STUDENTS' PRONUNCIATION AT KING KUMAR COURSE IN THE ACADEMIC YEAR OF 1999 / 2000

Abstract

The English teachers in public schools give less attention to stress of pronunciation, In other words, the English curriculum of secondary schools provides insufficient information about the importance of pronunciation practice in teaching and learning activity. However some teachers in English private courses might teach sufficient English pronunciation, for example those who teach in King Kumar Course. From the above phenomena, this research was concern with the errors in pronouncing the English words, especially syllable stress. This research had two problems, that is how and to what extent the students made syllable stress errors in pronuciation, So, the objectives were to know how and to what extent the students made syllable stress errors in pronunciation. The design of this research was descriptive. To get the research data, I purposively took 14 students from King Kumar Course as the respondents and used some instruments, that is pronunciation test, interview, and document I used the percentage formula to analyze the test result. The research findings show that the students made misplacement of the primary and weak stress. The average percentage of errors in making syllable stress was 13,5 %. This means that the students were in low criteria of errors because the average percentage was between 0 - 25 %. This shows that the English teachers in King Kumar Course should consider the students' words of which the stress was in the middle syllable more than there whose stress was at the initial syllable.