CHAPTER I INRODUCTION A.

Background Language is known as a tool of communication used by human being to express his thought, emotion, and desire to others by using sounds, gestures and signals. They can communicate with other group of people or nations. A successful communication needs communicative language media (communicative

competence) that have rules and norms, which should be carried out in communication. Then, language is so essential for everyone that cannot be separated from humans life. Richards (2007) state that English is the language of globalization, international communication, commerce and trade, the media and pop culture, different motivation for learning it come in to play (p. 20). For many countries, English is no longer viewed as a foreign language. It becomes second langugage. It is not only considered as the property of the English-speaking countries. It is now an international commodity sometimes reffered to as World English or English as an International language. Phonological of every language in the world have its own characteristics, especially in use of vowels and consonants. Phonological characteristics, especially the use of vowels and consonants in the language, can be seen from phonological diversity of some languages. For example, Tetun and English. The differences of phonological, particularly at the level of the vowels and consonants of each tribe in

2 the world, are the problems that cause students difficulty in learning a second language. Thats why there are a number of errors that appear in learning English as a second language. One of linguistic aspects is concerned to the contrastive linguistics. Contrastive analysis is the method of analysis whereby the differences and similarities of two or more language (or sub-systems of language) are made explicit (Naibaho, 2006). The interest in this analysis is merely the linguistic nature of languages compare without relating the differences and similarities to any speakers in the process of analysis. Generally, we can find the meaning of contrastive analysis by looking for its words separated. Analysis can be interpreted as to find out and to understand, and contrastive can be interpreted as difference. From that, we can find out that contrastive analysis is about how to find out and to understand the difference between two or more languages. In this case, the researcher limits the space only in the point of vowels sound. The researcher takes Tetun as a source language and English as the target language. The research is focused on the vowels between source language and target language. The reason why the researcher does this research is to find out the difficulties in learning English as a foreign language with comparing the data from two languages. It means that particular research in phonological aspects is very needed in case of finding the reason why it is difficult for Timor Leste people to learn English.

3 B. Problem Formulation In line with the problems described in the background, the research question posed is: How are Tetun and English phonemes different and similar? C. Research Question Based on the research formulation, the research questions are drawn as follows: 1. What are the vowels of Tetun and English? 2. How are the differences between the vowels of Tetun and English? 3. How are the similarities between the vowels of Tetun and English in pronunciation?

D. Research Objectives The objective of the research was to collect and analyze data related to the vowels of Tetun and English. The other reason is to find out perhaps there are differences between vowels of Tetun and English that causes errors in learning. E. Research significances The significances expected from this research are: 1. To researcher : The results of this research are expected can solve the problems of difficulties in learning English as a second language.

4 2. To other researcher : This research can be used as a references for the others researcher to develop studying contrastive analysis.