Teaching English in Multiethnic Classroom: A Case Study on Phonemic Variation of Secondary School Students in Central Kalimantan

Abstract

Abstract-Teaching English in multicultural or in multiethnic situation presents a unique challenge as the question is often raised by English teachers as to which variety of English phonemes or pronunciation should be accurately accepted. Indonesia has approximately 757 languages to be spoken by the same number of ethnic groups. Multicultural education is a very challenging issue to all aspects of studies today. It also applies to linguistics, where multiethnic students bear a unique perspective in the language repertoire, especially in the aspect of phonology. This paper (from the perspective of sociolinguistics) is the result of a case study in teaching English of speaking class to secondary school students in multiethnic classroom where English phonetic transcription is used as the data comparison to find phonemic variations among students' pronunciation. There were twenty students taken as the subject of the study which represented four ethnic groups of Indonesian; Dayak Ngaju, Banjar, Javanese, and Ma'anyan. The results showed that (1) the mother tongue accents of those ethnic groups influenced the way to pronounce phonemes of English; (2) those five ethnic groups had phonemic variation in speaking English in terms of vowel and consonant sounds.

The Variability in Phonology of Indonesian Learner’s Interlanguage: A case study on English marked-fricatives

“…They substituted the sounds which exist in their L1, namely [d], [t] and [ʃ] for the target sound [ð] due to the L1 transfer. This is also similar to Fauzi (2018) in his study on English pronunciation where some English consonant sounds are difficult to be pronounced by certain ethnics of Indonesian learners such as and [ʧ]. The reason for them being difficult is that they are commonly unfamiliar and some of them are not found in learners' native language.…”

The Sounds of Indonesian English: Acoustic Phonetic Analysis of the Monophthong Vowels Across Genders

“…The difficulty level in learning another language can be directly connected to the students' first language(s) in relation to the degree of linguistic differences (Sung, 2021). In terms of phonology, when some phonetic features in the target language are not found in the first language(s), students tend to produce dissimilar sounds (Fauzi, 2018). In the same vein, Goswami (2020) also found that the errors committed by Sylheti Bangla speakers of English can be attributed to the interference of the rules of their first language in learning the second language.…”