THE PRONUNCIATION PROBLEMS OF ENGLISH VOWEL SOUNDS: A CASE STUDY IN ENGLISH IMMERSION PROGRAM AT MERAH PUTIH INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE SCHOOL PALOPO

This research aimed to find pronunciation problems in English vowel sounds experienced by students in English immersion program at Merah Putih International Language School Palopo or the kinds of problems committed by students in English monophthongs. This research implemented a case study method. The subjects of this research were the students who took the English Immersion program at Merah Putih International Language School Palopo, and they are at the same semester at their campus. The Instruments used for collecting the data were researcher, recording and dictionary analyzed descriptively. The researcher found that students committed 4 kinds of pronunciation with the other existing cases, namely (1) the existence of the phonetic alphabets from the foreign sounds, (2) the different distribution of sounds that similar in phonetic features, (3) two languages with similar sounds which differ only slightly in their phonetic features, (4) a cluster of sounds in some English words and the other existing cases. It iwas concluded that all kinds of pronunciation problems appeared for all short monophthongs /ɪ/, /ʊ/, /e/, /ə/, /ɒ/, /ʌ/, /æ/ and all long monophthongs /i:/, /u:/, /ɜ:/, /ɔ:/, /ɑ:/ in variety ways. Keywords: Pronunciation problems, English monophthongs, English course students of Palopo, English immersion progra