THE IMPLEMENTATION OF TONGUE TWISTERS TO IMPROVE THE STUDENTS’ ABILITY TO PRONOUNCE FRICATIVE CONSONANTS AND LONG VOWELS

The main factor of failure in mastering speaking encountered by the eighth grade students of SMP Ma’arif 1 Ponorogo  in the academic year of 2014/21015 was dealing with pronunciation. The research was classroom action research that was conducted in two cycles with planning, acting, observing, and reflecting as the stages done in each cycle. The data were collected from the pre-test, test 1 and post-test as the quantitative data and from interviews, observation, and field note as the qualitative data. The data were analyzed by comparing the score of pre-test, test 1 and post-tests and by using interactive model method. The findings showed that the implementation of tongue twister as a teaching technique could improve the students’ pronunciation of fricative consonants and long vowels. In addition, it can be concluded that tongue twisters is an appropriate technique for teaching speaking, especially pronunciation.


INTRODUCTION
Humans are social creatures which mean that they cannot stay alone without the presence of others around them. They require other individual roles to be able to live in prosperous society. In establishing a good social life, the human need to communicate each other. The communication is needed to convey information, express feelings, arguments, ideas, and the communication activities will occur continuously during the process of human's life.
In the process of communication, humans need a language to achieve a goal of their communication, because without language communication will never be created. Clark (1996:3) states that language function is used in everyday conversation for transacting business, planning meals and vacation, debating politics and gossiping. Language is the most classical communication tool since human lives in the world. Barber (2009) states that language is also used to distinguish between human and animal. From those statements, itcan be concluded that language has so many roles in human's life. It is used to communicate in everywhere and every situation.
Today, English becomes an international language. If people are not proficient in English it means that they cannot communicate with the international community and people will be out of date, low insights and lack of knowledge. In Indonesia, the government encourages people to learn English officially start from junior high school until university level. In the education area, the students must comprehend English to reach the global knowledge.
Ideally, ability of the English language consists of listening, writing, speaking and reading. All of them are not easy to be mastered by EFL learners, mastering all of them need a very long time. Speaking, which is a simple way to communicate is also something difficult to master. Kormos (2006:xvii) states that speaking skill is often regarded to be more important nowadays. Meanwhile, Richard (2002:204) says that speaking in language is especially difficult for foreign language learners, because effective oral communication requires the ability to use language appropriately in social instructions. Richard (2009:19) states that for many second language or foreign language learners the ability of the speaking skill in English is priority.
In addition, foreign language is considered something new for the learners. Although English has been learned since the learners were young, the learners still find difficulties to use it as their second language. In addition, here are some aspects that cause the foreign language speech activity especially English is a difficult activity, such as the difficulty in expressing ideas orally, the limitation of vocabularies, the limitation ability of grammar, and lack of pronunciation. In addition, the environments where the learners of English as second language also influence the capability of them to use it.
Pronunciation is one the important aspects of speaking. Miss-pronunciation made by speakers may lead to misunderstanding. Kristina (2006:1) states that pronunciation is the way to produce sounds and process of achieving meaning by sound of speech in order to be understood. So that one of the most important that should be concerned in speaking is pronunciation.
In addition, Tominaga (2004:47) states that miss-pronounced in English word can create misunderstanding and miscommunication. Meanwhile, Carmen (2010:25) defines good pronunciation as: 1) Easy to understand by advanced users of English, 2) Pleasant to hear for advanced users of English, 3) Easy to pronounce for oneself. From those statements, it can be concluded that pronunciation is one of the most important aspects in speaking to avoid misunderstanding.
Pronunciation is regarded as the most difficult aspect to support the speech activity, because there are some things that influence a person's ability to pronounce the words in foreign languages appropriately such as mother tongue, motivation and age factor. Moreover, Cook in Gilakjani (2012:120) states that many learners believe pronunciation as one of the most difficult aspects of English to be mastered. Pronunciation is felt hard enough for them, because of their habit in using their first language and learning foreign language building up the new pronunciation habit.
Considering the importance of pronunciation, it is a very important aspect to learn. Gilakjani (2012:122) states that the learners need big help from the teacher to master pronunciation. However, one thing that should be emphasized by the teacher is that a good pronunciation does not mean that the students should be the same like native speaker's accent. Most people consider that someone who is proficient in English foreign language pronunciation is someone that has pronunciation like native speakers.

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According to Jenkins (2000:3), pronunciation has been marginalized in language teaching as a result of the communicate approach. In addition, Macackova (2012:7) argues that pronunciation as an inseparable aspect of the language has a great influence on our successful communication but it is still overlooked by a large number of teachers, who rather pay attention to teaching lexis and grammar as they feel more certain about them. It can be inferred that pronunciation is not valued enough in language pedagogy.
The statement of Jenkins reflects the real condition that happens in many schools in Indonesia. One of them is SMP Ma'arif 1 Ponorogo. Pronunciation teaching in SMP Ma'arif 1 Ponorogois overlooked. The students of SMP Ma'arif 1 Ponorogo have many problems in learning English, one of them is dealing with pronunciation.
In addition, teaching pronunciation is also not easy for Indonesian teachers. In many cases, English teachers do not find appropriate pronunciation teaching technique which is suitable with the students' needs. Moreover, in teaching pronunciation some teachers expect the pronunciation like native as the result. However, Jenner (1996) questions what the appropriate pronunciation goals are for second language learners. He points out that although there has been a resurgence of interest in pronunciation; those in the field are uncertain whether native-like pronunciation is an appropriate or achievable goal for non-native speakers. English is used in the worldwide as a language for conducting business, and many fields agree that the most important goals are intelligibility and transactional effectiveness, not native-like pronunciation. Machackova (2012:9) argues that pronunciation is a way how sounds are articulated by speakers marking their social class, education and so forth. When studying pronunciation we deal with a theoretical context of phonetics and phonology. Catford (1992:187) describes phonetics as the study of the physiological, aerodynamic, and acoustic characteristics of speech-sounds. Whereas phonology studies how sounds are organized into systems and utilized in languages. In addition, according to Machackova (2012:10), if we want to study the functions of language and the pronunciation itself we have to break down the constituent units. There are two main features of pronunciation, the segmental and supra-segmental features.
According to Kelly (2000:1), segmental features are sets of distinctive sounds of particular language and the supra-segmental features are related to intonation; stress and change of sounds in connected speech. Segmental features are divided into two sound categories; they are consonants and vowels (single and diphthongs). Meanwhile, suprasegmental features are divided into intonation and stress. Meanwhile, according to Seferoglu in Gilakjani (2012:122), segmental phonology is relatively more easily explained and taught than supra-segmental features.
The words "vowel" and "consonant" are very familiar ones, but when we study the sounds of speech scientifically we find that is not easy to define exactly what they mean (Roach, 2009: 10). Sounds maybe voiced or unvoiced (sometimes referred to as "voiceless"). Voiced sounds occur when the vocal cords in the larynx are vibrated. If you are producing a voiced sound, you will feel vibration; if you are producing an unvoiced sound, you will not. The difference between /f/ and /v/, for example, can be heard by putting your top teeth on your bottom lip, breathing out in a continuous stream to produce /f/, then adding your voice to make /v/. If the consonants are may be voiced or unvoiced, vowel sounds are all voiced and may be single (like /e/ as in let), or a combination, involving a movement from one vowel sound to another (like /eI/ as in late); such combinations as known as diphthongs. An additional term used is tripthongs which describes the combination of three vowel sounds (like in our or power). Single vowel sounds may be short (like /I/ as in bit) or long (like /i:/ as in heat. the symbol /:/ denotes a long sound (Kelly, 2000:2 In line with the pre-research observation, it was found that the students faced some problems in pronunciation. They often made mistakes when pronouncing the words related to long vowels, and fricative consonants. The summary of prior condition of the students in pronouncing fricative consonants and long vowels are presented in the Table  1. To get more information, the interview was conducted the English teacher of class VIII A about the activity and the problems during the teaching learning process based on teacher's point of view. He said that the most common activities were doing written exercises and giving the students assignment from the exercise book. He continued, the problems came from him and curriculum of English in Indonesia where English teaching is considered as knowledge and not a second language. The goal of teaching is preparing students in order to be able to answer the written examination perpustakaan.uns.ac.id digilib.uns.ac.id commit to user correctly. He also stated that the problems of him as a teacher, he didn't analyze the students' pronunciation deeply.
After that, pre-test was conducted. The students were asked to tell their name, address, hobbies, and dreams in front of the class. In order to get more data, the students were asked to read a text loudly. The students' mispronunciation was noted and for the real pre-test, the students were asked to retell a story about narrative text. The assessment was focused on the sounds of segmental features. Many students made mistakes when pronouncing long vowels, and fricative consonants. In line with the result of the pre-test, the mean scores of students in pronouncing fricative consonants and long vowels are presented in the Table 3. Interview with some students also conducted to know the causes of difficulties in pronunciation faced by them. Based on the result of the interview, it can be said that they faced difficulties in pronouncing English words because of the different regulation between English and Indonesian sound system. Almost of English words were pronounced in different when it pronounced in Indonesian. It made the students faced difficulties in pronouncing the English words correctly.
Moreover, the students were very rare having chances to speak up in the English class. The situation of speaking class was boring. Usually, the students were given a text from exercise book (LKS), and then they should translate it. After translating the text, the students should memorize the text. Unfortunately, the students did not have enough time to perform their text. Consequently, it will limit students' chance in practicing speaking, whereas practicing is very important in learning a language.
The implementation of this action research, it is aimed to improve students' pronunciation of fricatives consonants and long vowels by using tongue twisters. The research was conducted in two cycles. Each cycle was held in four meetings and every meeting spent 2x40 minutes. There would be the post-tests in the last meeting of cycle 1 and 2.

RESEARCH METHOD
This study took place in SMP Maarif 1 Ponorogo which is located at jl.Bathoro Katong 13 Ponorogo, East Java. The subject of the research was the students of class VIII A of SMP Ma'arif 1 Ponorogo. The students' ability in this class was considered to be the highest level than the other class. On the other hand, the students' competence in English was low. Most of students were good in school extracurricular but considered lower in academic. Besides, the students also had commit to user 6 low motivation in learning English as said by the teacher in pre-research interview.
This research is classroom action research that was conducted in the steps; planning the action, implementation/action, observation and reflection. There were two kinds of data; qualitative and quantitative data. The techniques of collecting data qualitative were observation, interview, recording, and field note. Meanwhile, the quantitative data were collected by administering pre-test and post-test before and after teaching and learning process in each cycle. Pre-test was held before the Cycle 1, test 1 was conducted after Cycle 1 and post-test was conducted after Cycle 2. The data resources were the subject of the research, the second grade students (VIII A) of SMP Maarif 1 Ponorogo. The oral test was conducted in form of storytelling performance for pre-test, test 1 and post-test. The assessment used scoring rubrics to see the improvement of students' pronunciation in speaking. From the test, there would be the score, mean (average score) which were gained by students to measure their ability in pronunciation.
The observation technique that was conducted in this study was full participant observation in which the researcher as a teacher and involved directly in teaching and learning process. It allowed the researcher to teach and observe at the same time and get more natural data from the students. The observation was conducted in pre-research and during the implementation of tongue twisters as pronunciation teaching technique. The qualitative data were analyzed by using interactive model method includes data reduction, data presentation and conclusion/verification. The quantitative data were analyzed by using simple mathematical formula to simplify, summarize and categorize the data. _ x = mean of pre-test score, _ y = mean of post-test score, N = number of students

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The research was conducted on May 11 th 2015 to June 3th 2015 consisted of two cycles. There were four meetings in each cycle. The test was conducted after each cycle that was followed by 20 students of VIII A class.
In the test 1, the students were asked to perform their monolog by retelling story the text that has been given during the meetings of cycle 1. Based on the observation and test, there were improvement in students' pronunciation and class situation in learning. The strengths of this cycle the students made improvement on each target of pronunciation in terms of segmental features including long vowels, and fricative consonants. They could pronounce correctly the vowel sounds of /u:/, /i:/,/ɑ:/, and fricative consonant sounds of /ð/, /ʃ/. The improvement can be seen from the table of mean scores. Besides, they looked more interested and active in learning.
The weaknesses was not all the target sounds of long vowels, and fricative consonants were not improved such as the vowels of /ɔ:, ə:/, and the fricative consonants perpustakaan.uns.ac.id digilib.uns.ac.id commit to user /θ, and /v/. Besides, the activeness and confident did not improve significantly. Most of students were active in asking or answering questions. However, few students were shy to ask related to the material. Besides, few students were still unwilling to speak in English. They were afraid of making mistakes when speaking.
After conducting reflection in cycle 1, I and collaborator found the problems which still occurred in the class. Therefore, the research then was continued to the second cycle. As it has been showed in cycle 1, most of the students still had difficulties in pronouncing long vowels, and fricative consonants. In addition, the students needed to be more interested in learning. Besides, in certain meeting, I almost ran off with the time in teaching and learning process. Based on the reasons above, revision solutions were constructed to make the cycle 2 better.
The plan was revised in order to achieve better result in cycle 2. The number of meeting was not added, but more various tongue twisters and more chances students to perform individually or pairing was given. Here, some solution offered: (1) using more varied of tongue twisters in teaching and learning process; (2) giving them more drilling on pronunciation (tongue twisters); and (3) using new activities in practicing speaking such as pair work or discussion in order to motivate the students and make the time more efficient. (4) Giving students tongue twisters recording as the guide to practice tongue twisters at home. The second cycle was started from Monday, May 25 th 2015 to Monday, June 8 th 2015.
The main topic is still narrative text in cycle 2. The process of teaching and learning was similar to what was conducted in the first cycle. The number of tongue twisters were added and written on a paper or through the video of tongue twisters delivered by native speaker and also the video of storytelling contest. Besides, tongue twisters were used as drilling in pre-activity and also before closing the lesson.
In the post-test, the students were asked to perform their monolog retelling story a narrative text individually. Based on the observation and test, there were improvement in students' pronunciation and learning. These improvements can be seen in the Table 4. Furthermore, the class situation also changed during the implementation from the cycle 1 until cycle 2. The changing of the class situation is presented in the Table 5.

Cycle 2
Students were unenthusiastic in learning Most of students were enthusiastic in learning All of students were looked enthusiastic in learning The students did not paid their attention to the material and preferred to chat with their friend during the teaching and learning process Most of students gave their attention to the material delivered. Some of them chatted with their friend Almost all students gave their attention the material. Only few students who chatted with their friend The students almost never did a discussion with their friend or asked to the teacher if they were confusing Most students did discussion with their pair and some of them were brave to ask All of students did discussion with their pair and many more of them were brave to ask Students were very seldom to practice their speaking because they were afraid of making mistakes.
Some of the students practiced in front of the class confident.
All of students practiced in front of the class more confident.
There was better improvement in students' pronunciation after comparing the result of post-test in cycle 1 and cycle 2. The mean scores of post-test 1 and post-test 2 has increased. The students made progress on each target of pronunciation. The students improved their pronunciation in vowel sounds of / ɔ:, ə:/ and fricative consonants of /θ, and /v/. All in all, the students have improved their pronunciation in long vowels /i:, u:, ə:, ɔ: ɑ:/, fricative consonants/θ, ð, v, /ʃ/. Besides, by giving a bit different activity such work in pair, the students became more active and interested in joining teaching and learning process. It can be seen when the students did a discussion with their friend and felt freely to ask to the teacher when they were confusing in learning. They looked more confident in speaking. Furthermore, using tongue twisters as warming up activity made the students more accustom to pronounce tongue twisters and lead to be more proficient to pronounce the target sounds.
Unfortunately, not all of the students could reach the target sounds of long vowels, and fricative consonants. Few students were still difficult to pronounce vowel sounds of /ə:, ɔ:/, and fricative consonants of /v and θ/. They still need more practice to improve their pronunciation skill on those sounds.

Problems Related to the Implementation of Tongue Twisters to Improve the Students' Ability to Pronounce Fricative and Long Vowel Sounds
There were several problems during the implementation of tongue twisters to improve the students' ability to pronounce fricative and long vowel sounds. Here is the explanation of the problems during the implementation of tongue twisters:

Teacher/researcher
Tongue twisters is a technique that in implementing it, the teacher must insert it in the process of English learning. Designing the various activities of tongue twisters was difficult for the researcher. The various activities were needed to prevent the students being bored. During the cycle 1 and 2, tongue twisters were implemented as a warming up activity. It was inserted it in the teaching narrative text. In other chance, tongue twisters were implemented not just like a drilling technique the students must repeat what perpustakaan.uns.ac.id digilib.uns.ac.id commit to user 9 teacher said. Tongue twisters were modified like a game that all of the students participated in it in form of team work, not individually.

Assessment
Pronunciation is the skill that cannot be assessed word by word only (isolation). In assessing pronunciation, it must be inserted in a context such as introducing myself, storytelling, or maybe short speech. So, when the students were mastered in pronouncing tongue twisters, it did not mean that students were mastered in pronunciation. In this study, tongue twister was inserted in narrative text. It made sure the narrative text that was chosen consisted words with fricative and long vowels sounds. Then, storytelling had been chosen as the performance test.

Students
The second problem came from the students. The basic condition of the students' of SMP Ma'arif 1 Ponorogo was almost never doing speaking activity. They were very rare in practice to speak or pronounce English words. Because of that condition, when tongue twisters applied, the students were very difficult to pronounce it. It was also because the structure of tongue twisters itself. Tongue twisters are complex unit of words that is difficult to articulate properly. Moreover, the students did not have a guide to guide them in practicing tongue twisters at home.

Tongue twisters as pronunciation teaching technique
Although almost of every language have own tongue twisters just like Javanese or Indonesian tongue twisters, but English tongue twisters were different. There is grade of difficulty of the tongue twisters; easy, medium and hard tongue twisters. For the Indonesian students, tongue twisters must be learnt from the easiest grade, then medium, and hard. Selecting the grade difficulty of the tongue twisters and appropriated it with the grade of the students were not easy work. The result of the research showed that tongue twisters can improve the students' pronunciation and changed class atmosphere to be more interesting. The improvement of students' pronunciation can be seen from the mean scores from the pre-test, post-test 1, and post-test 2 that increased. In the beginning, the students made many errors in pronouncing vowel sounds such as /i:, u:, ɔ:, ɑ:, ɜː/, and fricative consonants of / θ, ð, ʃ, and v/.
After learning using tongue twisters during eight meetings, the students achieved better pronunciation. They could minimize or even omit the errors in pronouncing long vowels, and fricative consonants. The result of the tests showed that the students improved their pronunciation in long vowel sounds /i:, u:, ɔ:, ɑ: and ɜ:/ and fricative consonants/ θ, ð, ʃ, and v/.
The activity of imitating native speaker's saying and giving students more chance to practice speaking are very useful. If they made some mistakes in pronouncing, the correction was given to those mispronouncing words directly. The students were given explanation about the material and allowed the students to ask if there was confusing thing. After that, the students were asked to make a performance of storytelling narrative text that has been given. Besides, the students also were asked to search the fricative consonants and long vowels in from of words written the text of narrative they had. After that, the students were asked to discuss their work with the group. This activity was intended to give the students more chance in speaking.
Moreover, tongue twisters were used to drill the students as often as possible in order to accustom students with the sounds of long vowels and fricative consonants they were difficult to pronounce. From the result of test 1 and post-test 2 it can be concluded that tongue twisters was effective to improve the students' ability in pronunciation commit to user especially segmental features of pronunciation dealing with vowels and consonants. The examples of tongue twisters are presented in Table 8.  Fangzhi (1998:38) states that the practices tongue twisters are good for introducing English sound to beginners and also good for building a strong basic pronunciation. From the Fangzhi's statement, it can be concluded that being aware of basic pronunciation (phonemes and sounds) are very important and the tongue twisters are one of the techniques to grab it.
Moreover, Machackova (2012:42) states that tongue twisters are not only a linguistic fun and game but serve a practical purpose for language and speech development. For example, tongue twisters may be used by foreign students of English to improve their accent and speech pathologists often use them as a tool to help those with speech difficulties. Tongue twisters concentrate on accurate production and help students to improve their pronunciation skills. The objective of tongue twisters is to help the students to realize how important accurate pronunciation is through enjoyable activities.
During the implementation of tongue twisters, English learning became more interesting and students looked enjoy to join the learning. It was supported by Linse (2005) that tongue twister is fun way to teach pronunciation to young children in EFL classroom. Then, according to Fangzhi (1998), tongue twisters can increase student's motivation in a pronunciation class and this is a significant factor in pronunciation.
However, there were some sounds that were not improved significantly such as the sounds of long vowel /ɔ:/, and fricative consonants /v/. Based on the result of the interview to several students, they thought that the regulation of sound system in English and Indonesian was different. Since childhood, they have been speaking their mother tongue, which has been deeply implanted in them as part of their habits. The movements of their speech organs have been set to produce the speech sounds of their language. They are much influenced by their native language, Javanese or Indonesian, which tremendously different to English as a foreign language they are learning. The letter or word in English is almost pronounced in different way when it pronounced in Indonesian. Consequently, they face difficulties in changing the habit of moving their speech organs in such a way as to produce the foreign sounds and tend to transfer their own systems to the foreign language. This is supported by Vernick and Veggoda in Cultural and Language Learning (2011) who state that language learners may find difficulties in learning to speak English well because several spelling may be represented by a single sound. Difficulties in English occur due to the fact that some of English sounds are not found in the mother tongue of the learners.
Although some problems came up during the implementation of tongue twisters, but the implementation of tongue twisters ran well. It was showed by the improvement of students in pronouncing fricative consonants and long vowels in form of the score that was improved from the pre-test, cycle 1 and cycle 2. Moreover, tongue twisters has changed the learning situation of the class became more interesting. They were able to discuss the task with their partner and complete the task seriously. When performing the storytelling, they looked more confident and could practice the dialog better.

CONCLUSION
The implementation of tongue twisters can improve the students' ability to pronounce fricative consonants and long vowels as long as it is combined with an appropriate activity. Besides, tongue twisters also could improve the students' vocabulary at the same time. The classroom condition became more interesting and alive. However, the implementation of tongue twisters consumed time so much and students need to adapt the technique longer and as often as possible. Therefore, the English teachers should select carefully suitable activities for teaching pronunciation by tongue twisters.