The Importance of Pronunciation in English School Books

Primanda Dewanti

Abstract

Pronunciation is one of the most important language elements for students in studying English. Ideally, teachers should provide activities which can improve students’ pronunciation. However, most of the school teachers nowadays do not pay much attention to it, so that they rarely provide pronunciation-improving activities. Pronunciation is merely inserted in the school curriculum in the speaking skill. Furthermore, only a few school books provide it. This article will attempt to see about (1) the definition of pronunciation and its aspects, (2) why English teachers neglect it, (3) how to solve the problem, and (4) what activities can be involved in school books. Hopefully, the article provides enough information for students, teachers, and the policy maker of curriculum that pronunciation is very important in English learning.

Keywords: pronunciation, school books.

IMPROVING STUDENTS’ GRAMMAR IN WRITING USING PEER-CORRECTION METHOD

Primanda Dewanti

English is taught in Junior High School in Indonesia as a foreign language. It has four skills, namely listening, speaking, reading and writing. Writing skill is an important part of communication. It is also an important part to learn for a seventh grader at the junior high school. Sometimes it becomes a big matter for some students to write something effectively. Most of them say that they cannot do it well. However, McKay in his article entitled Why Writing Skills Are Important says that writing effectively is a skill that can be learned. It is quite very different from writing literary works such as poetry, prose, or drama which are said talent-based writing. It is just a matter for the teacher to find the right method to teach it well. Teaching writing in junior high school, especially in the seventh grade, can be started by applying the simple words and structure. It is quite necessary for the teacher to use almost the same words and structure with the ones in the conversation. From the quotation above, it can be concluded that it is possible to teach writing effectively in the school especially using the easy and affordable materials. If the words or sentence structure are not convenient to speak, it is better for us to use another one in writing.