According to the auditory text that we have listened and analysed, the situation take

place in a radio prank call. It involved Speaker A, who is an old Chinese caterer and Speaker B
who is the radio announcer. Speaker B is a native English speaker. Speaker A has several
problems in deliver her speech that cause misunderstanding during the prank call. However, her
pronunciations is not too serious. It is because Speaker B still can understand what she was
going to say. Speaker A did mispronunced quite number of words, adding a lot of fillers in her
sentence and have problems with the use of stress and intonation in deliver her speech. She
might influenced with her first language which is Mandarin. However, there are a lot of ways that
can improve Speaker A’s skills of communication.

Speaker A used the wrong word stress and intonation in her conversation with Speaker
B. This is happened due to her Chinese’s regional dialect. It had been proved by Chun (1982) in
Chen at. al. (2001) that the stress pattern of English sentences produced by L2 English
speakers have been found to deviate from native English speakers. As Mandarin is one of the
tonal language, wrong stress is given to some particular words which had led to
misunderstandings during the communication. Therefore, Speaker A has problem to use
appropriate intonation in the conversation. For example, she made an ambiguous statement by
putting wrong stress at word ‘curry’ and change it into declarative statement which is supposed
to be a question. As a result, she have made Speaker B confused as he did not answer the
question. In order to overcome this problem, it is recommended for Speaker A to improve her
English as her L2 by reducing the accent in stress production. She can watch lots of English
movies which can help her to identify the correct pattern of stress and intonation in a
conversation. It had been proved by Dulani (2015) that English language movies help the
students learn about English phrases, improve vocabulary, catch authentic language, become
familiar with the different accents of native speakers, and as opportunities to listen to correct
pronunciation and intonation patterns.
 Chinese and English has greatly difference in number of vowels according to their
phonological system. According to Ohata (2007) Chinese has 15 vowels meanwhile English has
only five vowels in total (San, 2007). This difference resulted Chinese learner to pronounce new
vowels when they started to learn English language. The problem also due to difference
locations of articulation system between Chinese vowels and English vowels. The pronunciation
of the English [a:] and [ʌ], which is similar to the Chinese vowel [a]. Although the position of
articulation for the Chinese [a] is higher compared to English [a:] and [ʌ], they only try to extend
or reduce the length of Chinese [a] to produce [a:] and [ʌ] respectively (Feifei, 2013). This
phenomenon cannot be done by L2 learners because the wrong position of articulatory system
will lead to wrong enunciation and meaning of words. For instance, Speaker A pronounced
‘wari’ (wa:ri) which carry no meaning instead of ‘worry’ (wʌri).

Chinese also have problems in pronouncing some consonants such as alveolar glide [ɾ].
According to Feifei (2013), when producing Chinese [ɾ], the position of tongue is more forward
and flatter compared to the position of tongue when producing the English [ɾ]. The Chinese [ɾ]
can be placed in both initial and final positions of a syllable. Due to that, the word /fraɪd rʌɪs/ in
‘fried rice’ was pronounced as /flaɪd lʌɪs/ by speaker A. That pronunciation made Speaker B
laughs and downgrade Speaker A’s way of pronouncing words. Other than that, consonants [v]
and [w] which is a minimal pair, have only one similar consonant in Chinese. Chinese
consequently articulate /v/ as /w/ or /w/ as /v/ (Feifei, 2013). This is proven when Speaker A
pronounced /wεli/ to represent the word ‘very’ which should be pronounced as /vεri/. Moreover,
it is hard for Chinese to enunciate the diphthong in a correct way. This is because, Chinese
doesn’t have /ɔɪ/, /ɪə/, /əʊ/, /eə/, /ʊə/. The Chinese ‘ou’ is pronounced /oʊ/ instead of /əʊ/.
Because of that, Speaker A pronounced ‘hello’ as ʌloʊ/ instead of /həˈləʊ/ and another proof is
Speaker A pronounced coke as /kɒk/ instead of /kəʊk/ which caused a misunderstanding to
Speaker B as cock can also be a male bird and a vulgar word. That pronunciation may lead
Speaker B to have a negative perceptions towards Speaker A. That would be one of the bad
things that may happen when we mispronounce words. This is because, once the word is
pronounced incorrectly, it might have another meaning that is totally different with the original
word that we actually want to utter. So, it is proven that Speaker A mispronounced the words
because of the influence from her mother tongue.
 Based on the above-mentioned problem, there are ways to make Speaker A be a better
pronouncer in English and one of them is by going to English or Linguistic classes. It is
because, in order to learn new things or new language or in this context, foreign language, we
need to learn a lot from the native speakers of the language. For example, Speaker A can use
the social media platforms such as YouTube, to learn about the articulatory system because
according to Raniah and Tariq (2015), YouTube technology can be considered as a valuable
learning tool. There a lot of Youtubers take that platforms to teach their languages to the
foreigners like English with Lucy, Neu English and Crown Academy of English. They make
videos like “10 English Words that You Pronounce Incorrectly”, “Pronounce the 100 Most
Common English Words”, and “International Phonetic Alphabet”. So, it is up to us, whether we
want to take that opportunities or vice versa as this is the world that we are living now.
Furthermore, the use of videos is greatly effective especially for introductory courses as it can
facilitate difficult concepts, and attract the attention of students as well as special students
(Mayer, 2001).

In short, segmental and suprasegmental aspects really play a big role in order to achieve
the objective of our communication. This is proven in the transcription of the audio when some
of the words that Speaker A uttered caused a little bit of misunderstanding for Speaker B. So, it
is clearly seen that the way we articulate the words really matters. However, practice makes
perfect. In everything that we do, we need a lot of practice and learn with experienced people or
in this context, with native speakers. It is called a process of learning.
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Feifei Han. (2013). Pronunciation problems of Chinese learners of English. ORTESOL Journal.
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Mayer, R.( 2001). Cognitive
principles of multimedia learning: The
role of modality and
contiguity. Journal of Education
Psychology.