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Father as a Caregiver: The Thipology of Father Parenting Style
While Mother doesn’t Exist and the Effect to Child Autonomy
Corry Caromawati
1
, and Agung Kurnia
2
1
Institut Teknologi Nasional, Bandung, Indonesia
2
Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Bandung, Indonesia
{Corrycaromawati, agungkurnia.aku}@gmail.com
Keywords: English as a lingua franca, intelligibility, vowel contrast.
Abstract: This study investigated the characteristics (place and duration) of the vowel contrasts produced by Indonesian
students of English and whether they contrasted the lax and tense vowels. Ten female students participated in
this study. The data were collected through a listening and speaking task focusing on the vowel contrasts and
analyzed using acoustic analysis. The findings showed that the participating students produced the /u/ and
/ʊ/ at the relatively expected locations and contrasted them, but not the other vowel contrasts (/ɛ/ and /æ/ and
/i/ and /ɪ/). In terms of duration, the vowels produced by the participants were inconsistent, and they were not
contrasted. These findings are interpreted as a support to the previous study, and advocate for more
pronunciation instruction through listening exercise to expose the difference of the lax and tense vowels.
1 INTRODUCTION
The main aim of learning a language is to be able to
communicate with people who speak that particular
language. In order to achieve the aim, Jenkins (2000)
suggests that language learners should be able to be
intelligible when speaking to the native speakers or
other speakers of that language. Therefore, it is
important for language learners to avoid errors in
producing segmental (individual sounds) and
suprasegmental features such as pitch and rhythm that
will cause communication breakdowns. Even though
both segmental and suprasegmental units are
important, Jenkins’ (2000) study showed that errors
in segmental units tend to be more problematic than
suprasegmental, especially when the errors occur
frequently due to the speakers’ inability to produce
the proper ones. Nonetheless, not all errors in
segmental units will cause communication
breakdowns. There are some segmental units that are
more problematic than others. These units are
considered to have higher functional load because
when a speaker does not produce them correctly, a
communication misunderstanding or breakdown will
be inevitable. Therefore, it is necessary for language
speakers to be aware of this risk and learn how to be
able to produce them correctly.
Even though Jenkins (2000) claimed that vowel
quality does not affect intelligibility, a study
conducted by Deterding and Mohamad (2016)
provides evidence that vowel quality was involved in
a substantial number of communication breakdown
occurrences found in the Asian Corpus of English
(ACE), one occurrence became a strong support of
how vowel quality became the main factor of a
communication breakdown.
It is believed that language learners will find the
segmental unit production challenging if the features
either do not exist or are different to those of their
mother tongue. For Indonesian speakers of English,
vowel production can be problematic since the vowel
system in Indonesian language is not similar to that of
English because English has lax and tense vowel
pairs. These vowel pairs indeed have high functional
loads (Brown, 1991), especially when the vowels are
in taboo words. For example, the minimal pairs beach
[bitʃ] and bitch [bɪtʃ]
Koffi (2016) also believed that if the vowel pairs
are not contrasted by at least 61 Hertz, the listeners
will not be able to perceive them well. Unfortunately,
Indonesian speakers of English who lived in the USA
only contrasted the dimension of the /u/ and /ʊ/
(Caromawati & Muhammad, 2015). As to our
knowledge no studies have been done on vowel
contrasts of Indonesian learners of English learning
58
Caromawati, C. and Kurnia, A.
Father as a Caregiver: The Thipology of Father Parenting Style While Mother doesn’t Exist and the Effect to Child Autonomy.
DOI: 10.5220/0007162000580062
In Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference
on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education (CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017) - Literacy, Culture, and Technology in Language Pedagogy and Use, pages 58-62
ISBN: 978-989-758-332-2
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