Teaching English in Multiethnic Classroom: A case study on phonemic variation of secondary school students in Central Kalimantan

摘要

Teaching English in multicultural or in multiethnic situation presents a unique challenge as the question is often raised by English teachers as to which variety of English phonemes or pronunciation should be accurately accepted. Indonesia has approximately 757 languages to be spoken by the same number of ethnic groups. Multicultural education is a very challenging issue to all aspects of studies today. It also applies to linguistics, where multiethnic students bear a unique perspective in the language repertoire, especially in the aspect of phonology. This paper (from the perspective of sociolinguistics) is the result of a case study in teaching English of speaking class to secondary school students in multiethnic classroom where English phonetic transcription is used as the data comparison to find phonemic variations among students' pronunciation. There were twenty students taken as the subject of the study which represented four ethnic groups of Indonesian; Dayak Ngaju, Banjar, Javanese, and Ma'anyan. The results showed that (1) the mother tongue accents of those ethnic groups influenced the way to pronounce phonemes of English; (2) those five ethnic groups had phonemic variation in speaking English in terms of vowel and consonant sounds.