PROBLEMS IN IDENTIFYING ENGLISH SINGLE CONSONANTS SILENT LETTERS: EXPERIENCE OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT STUDENTS OF STATE ISLAMIC INSTITUTE OF KERINCI

Abstract The purpose of this study was to explore the experience of eighteen students of English department of state Islamic institute of kerinci in producing single consonants silent letters of plosive /t/ and /d/ and liquid /l / in the middle of words, plosive /k/, and glide /w/ in the initial through surveys and semi-structured in-depth interviews. The research design was qualitative in the phenomenological approach (Conklin, 2007; Peters, 2010; Eddles-Hirsch, 2015).The interview were written verbatim in line format aligned according to the questions from the interview to help match or contradict corresponding responses from the different cases (Merriam, 2001), then analyzed and compare through comparative thematic analysis In this study, we compare each participant theme to explain the data finding in pronouncing English single consonants silent letters. We identified three major factors that influence students’ English pronunciation in interview, including (a) first language interference, (b) the knowledge of silent letters, and (c) the necessary of earliest pronunciation.