| Indonesians learning English have considerable trouble pronouncing and perceiving English word-final consonant clusters. Word-final consonant clusters are of particular importance in English because they contain important, high frequency morphological and morphosyntactic information (e.g. subject agreement, plural marking, possessive marking, passive morphology etc.). There has not yet been a comprehensive experimental study investigating which types final clusters Indonesians have the most trouble pronouncing; therefore, teachers lack an efficient strategy for teaching Indonesians to English word-final clusters.With this in mind, this thesis presents the results of an experimental study which asks the following questions: (1) Which word-final clusters do advanced Indonesian learners of English typically fail to pronounce? (2) In what ways do Indonesian learners reduce word-final clusters in English? (3) In the classroom, which types of word-final consonant clusters should be prioritized/ targeted to most efficiently and effectively improve pronunciation?. The participants in this study were 6 Indonesian learners, 4 participants enrolled in the English department at the Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesian, and the other 2 were English Teacher for Junior High School. Speakers’ pronunciation of all attested final cluster types in English was recorded and analyzed. The results showed that mispronunciation was more likely to affect obstruent sounds, and that learners primarily employed two simplification strategies in pronouncing final clusters: deletion and devoicing of obstruent. Deletion primarily affected obstruent stops (such as; /k/, /g/, /t/, /p/, /d/ and /b/). Limited examples of metathesis and epenthesis were also observed. Based on the findings of this study, this thesis proposes a targeted methodology for teaching Indonesian students to pronounce English final clusters. |