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CAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

A. Background

We know that English is not only international language but also global

language now. It is used to communicate in whole of the world. English is used in

education, trade, tourism, news, and technology. Pronunciation is one of the

language components in English which is needed to be learned to support the

development of language skills mastery of the students specially in speaking, and

it hold an important role in English teaching since most of country has totally

different pronunciation counted Indonesia. Pronunciation is the first factor when

someone speaking. It can avoid a misunderstanding when we speak with the other people.

To be understood by others, they should pay attention to their pronunciation.

“Pronunciation is the language faeture that most readily identifies speakers as non-native.

It is a filter through which others see them and often descriminate againts them.”

(Susanna Modesti, 2014:9)

Pronunciation is the first thing that people notice when during a conversation.

Pronunciation is the way of speaker to give information by producing the sounds.

It is also the most important and difficult problem that English foreign language

(ELF) student have to face when studying English. Improper pronunciation can

lead to negative impression misunderstanding and ineffective communication.

Compared to english indonesian language generally does not have differences

between spelling the letter and pronouncing te sounds.

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The specific characteristic of English learners who categorized as a good and

successful oral skill developer is those who have a good pronunciation of English

consonant and English vowel. Therefore, it is necessary for English learners to

have a good pronunciation to support them to be good speaker (Nurhayati : 2008).

Due to the problem above, most of the result indicates that the students have low

ability in pronunciation included the students of the second grade high school .

Based on the researchers’ observation, she got that the students still have much

difficulty when they are asked to pronounce. Besides that, based on the students’

mean score is still low .

According to harmer (2007: 59), for all those who learn english. Being

made aware of pronunciation issues will give them benefit not only to their own

pronunciation but also to their own understanding of spoken english. This is

means, the student who gave good pronunciation they can speak and understand

the spoken English and being understood by the others. Therefore, it is prominent

for the students to learn pronunciation.

There are many ways to tech pronunciation, one of them is homophone

games according to etymology, homophone is taken from the Greek word,

"homos" which means "same". "Telephone" which means "voice" or "voice"

(Turnball : 2009) In another meaning homophone is a word that is pronounced the

same as another word but has a different meaning (Lopez, S. J. 2009). Homophones

are words that sound the same but have different meanings and spellings( Limpo :

2016).
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Games also is very good to help increasing knowledge and linguistic

skills. Aman Yurisaldi said game is important media. It is very good for education

learning media. The term is called out edutainment. Here, his reason to use game

as for learning process

As explained above, in SMK Negeri 1 Jeneponto is still lacking because

the method of teaching teachers at the school only focuses on the way of writing,

therefore the researcher wants to help students improve their pronunciation more

and would like to conduct the research under the title “Improving students

pronounciation through homophone games”

B. Problem Statement

Based on the background above, the researcher formulating the problem

statement as follows:

1. Does pronunciation improve the student’s pronunciation ability trought

homophone game ?

2. How the student’s perception about homophone game ?

C. Objective Of The Research

The objective of this study are:

1. To find out whether the use of homophone game is improve the student’s

pronunciation ability or not.

2. To find out the student’s perception about homophone game

D. Significance Of The Research

The result of this research will be expected to be able to prove and support

other teories before, and also this result of research hopefully can provide the
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useful information about tte benefits of using homophon game in the learning

process of pronouncation. There are a lot of practically significant from the result

that can be use and usefull for teacher, students, and also subsequent researcher.

E. Scope Of the research

The scope of the research is limited to the use of homophone games in

teaching pronouncation to looked for the student improving ability in X Grade of

high school.