Markedness in the Pronunciation Errors Committed by the English Department Students of Class of 2017 at Andalas University

This thesis discusses students’ pronunciation errors in English fricative consonants [z], [v], [ʃ], [ʒ], [θ], [ð] and vowels [ə] and [æ]. All of the sounds do not exist in the Indonesian language. The participants of this research are English Department Students, Faculty of Humanities, Andalas University, the year of 2017. They are selected by using stratified random sampling with gender as the criteria of the strata. Based on that method, there are 14 selected students. They consist of 7 men and 7 women. Fifteen sentences are used to collect the data. After that, students’ pronunciation errors are connected with Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) by Eckman (1977). Markedness relation hierarchy among fricative consonant sounds is identified by Lombardi’s markedness relation hierarchy. However, sonority markedness among vowel sounds is identified by De Lacy’s vowel sonority markedness (2006). There are some other theories used to support the analysis such as phonology, interlanguage, language transfer, dan error analysis. The result of the analysis shows that most of the students do pronunciation errors in fricative consonants [z]. They substitute [z] into [s], 77.14%. After that, from two vowel sounds [ə] and [æ], [æ] is frequently pronounced in error way by the students, 29.87%. They substitute [æ] into [a] and [e]. Based on the analysis, it can be concluded that English fricative consonants [z], [v], [ʃ], [ʒ], [θ], [ð] and vowels [ə] and [æ] are treated as marked sounds by the students. They tend to change marked sounds in the target language into their native language sounds. It occurs because those sounds are not found in the Indonesian language