English Misspelling Made by the seventh grade students of SMPN 13 of Malang

ABSTRACT

It is a common case that English has no close one-to-one correspondence between the letters and sounds. Some words have same letters, but those are pronounced differently. On the other hand, there are some English words which are similar in the way they are pronounced although they are represented in different letter sequences. Thus, getting perfect English spelling is not easy for some people. Because of the English inconsistency, some English words are commonly misspelled into other forms.

This study is conducted to observe words misspelled by the seventh grade students of SMPN 13 of Malang. The research problems are: first, what kinds of misspelling made by the seventh grade students of SMPN 13 of Malang are, and second, why the seventh grade students of SMPN 13 of Malang misspell English words. Then, the objectives of this study are to find out the kinds of misspelling made by the seventh grade students of SMPN 13 of Malang and to explain why the seventh grade students of SMPN 13 of Malang misspell English words.

The study applied qualitative approach which took the students’ writing when they were doing listening test. It means that the study entered to the natural setting and the researcher did not do any experiments. In addition, this study used phonological perspective to describe and explain the kinds of misspelling happened. Still, speech perception theory was also used to give deep explanation about the misspelling’s causes.

The data were gathered from the English writings of students of class E when they were doing listening test. After gathering the data, the researcher read the data repeatedly to look for the misspelled words and tried to discuss misspelling in the categorization, both concerning with the kinds and causes. Finally, the researcher made systematic categorization of misspelling’s kinds based on the data presentation

From this study, the researcher found out that the kinds of misspelling made by the students were: (1) misspelling of vowels; (2) misspelling of fricatives: dental fricatives ( ð), labiodental fricatives (f-v) and alveopalatal fricative ( ); (3) misspelling of apostrophe; (4) misspelling of consonant preceded by consonant; (5) misspelling of consonant doubling; (6) misspelling of digraph; (7) misspelling of stops: alveolar stops (t-d) and bilabial stops (p-b); (8) misspelling of silent