PHONOLOGICAL INTERFERENCE: A CASE STUDY OF CHINESE, JAPANESE, SOUTH KOREAN STUDENTS SPEAKING INDONESIAN

ABSTRACT PHONOLOGICAL INTERFERENCE: A CASE STUDY OF CHINESE, JAPANESE, SOUTH KOREAN STUDENTS SPEAKING INDONESIANThe influence of L1 structure when learning L2 is the first phase which possibly occurs in the L2 learning process. This occurs when foreign students learn Indonesian as their L2. Language interference occurs when they are speaking Indonesian. By disregarding proper pronunciation when speaking,it will confusethe listener which then lead to misinterpretation (Candra, 2005).Furthermore, the different ways in pronouncing Indonesian words causesconfusion for the interlocutor. This study was conducted to find phonological interference made by Chinese, Japanese and South Korean students in speaking Indonesian.The research design of this study is descriptive qualitative. In collecting the data, the researcher used recorded interview, transcribed the dialogue into phonetic transcriptions, found the mispronounced words, and analyzed them. The samples were 3 students (a native speaker of Mandarin, Japanese and Korean, respectively). All of them are students of Dharmasiswa Indonesian Scholarship Program.The results show that there were 694 mispronounce words out of the 3.232 words. However, after classified all of the mispronounced words, there were only287 phonological interferences caused by the influence of their first language. It was revealed that every student has different types of phonological interference. The first was the Chinese student: she experienced seven kinds of phonological interference. Deletion 66 words (42%), devoicing 23 words (14%), vowel change 19 words (12%), coalescence 17 words (11%), backing 16 words (10%), voicing 13 words (8%), and methasis 5 words (3%).The second one was a Japanese student: she experienced five kinds of phonological interference. Deletion 30 words (55%), vowel change 16 words (29%), fronting 5 words (9%), coalescence 3 words (5%), and voicing 1 word (2%). The last one was a South Korean student: he also experienced five kinds of phonological interference. deletion 23 words (40%), aspiration 17 words (23), gemination 14 words (19%), vowel change 11 words (15%), and stopping 2 words (3%). Finally it can be concluded that all of the students have experienced the phonological interference and deletion is the most frequent type of phonological interference. Secondly,their L1 has potential to cause the phonological interference. The researcher hopes that this study can give new sight and information about the Indonesian phonological interference. Meanwhile, despite serving details on the findings and discussion, this study only focus on segmental unit. Future study may have a research not only segmental unit but also suprasegmental unit to widen the discussion in psycholinguistics