THE USE OF MINIMAL PAIR TEHNIQUE IN TEACHING PRONUNCIATION AT SECOND GRADE STUDENT OF SMA MUHAMMADIYAH SUNGGUMINASA

Abstract

The difficulty in distinguishing the pronunciation of words that have similar sound is one of challenges faced in English Classes, especially in pronunciation class. Students usually pronounce words as written. Minimal pair technique is used in this research. This research aims to see whether the use of minimal pair technique have an influence on improving students' pronunciation skills. Problem Statement “Is the use of a minimal pair technique effective in teaching English pronunciation at the second grade students of SMA Muhammadiyah Sungguminasa?” while Objective of the Research is ”To find out whether or not the minimal pair technique is effective in teaching pronunciation”. This research is limited to the use of minimal pair technique as a treatment and focus on vowel sound (/I//e//æ//ɔ//ʌ//ʊ//ə//i: //ɑ://ɔ://3://u :/). Quasi-experimental design with non-equivalent control group design was applied. The populations are the students at SMA Muhammadiyah Sungguminasa. The samples are 2 classes as experimented and control class using purposive sampling. The independent variable is the minimal pair technique and the dependent variable is the students’ pronunciation.To collects the data, researcher used pre-test and the post-test. The data obtained were analyzed with analysis techniques like descriptive analysis, normality, homogeneity, sample t-test (paired and independent sample t test), N-Gain Analysis test using IBM SPSS 25. The result of this this research shows that minimal pair technique was effective in improving students pronunciation; with  probability in sample t test (Sig.) 0,000<0.05 then Ho is rejected. N-Gain value also concluded that experimental class compared to the control class was 0.52>0.26; this shows that the used of the Minimal Pair technique in the experimental class is more effective than control class.