I am often questioned by the participants of education and training if there is a special English for example for broadcasting, news and engineering. I answered the question that I have never found such English for Special purpose (ESP). There are indeed English for Special Purpose for business, for example. But, what is called by ‘special’ is actually the content, while the English used in it is actually general English.
I wrote this article based on my research that English is often mispronounced and mis-stressed by Indonesian learners, even some announcers of broadcasting organization. And I am not quit sure that most English teachers of junior and senior high school pronounce and stress English words correctly.
They probably don’t realize that their English pronunciation and stress are incorrect, because no one notices it or no student understands that their teachers do wrong pronunciation and stress.
One of the factors that causes incorrect pronunciation and stress is probably they have not learned English accurately based on the International Phonetic Alphabets (IPA) which will guide the learners how to pronounce and give stress on the syllable of a word correctly.
Indonesian people generally do not recognize stress on the syllable of a word. On the other hand English (people) naturally use stress on every word. If the word consists of a syllable only, the word is usually given stress on it. And if the word consist of two or more syllable, the stress is given on one of the syllables.( example of stresses on words will be seen in this article.)
This article is expected to help English learners (readers) to smoothen their English, especially in pronunciation, stress, and style, so that their English does not sound funny/strange to English native speakers or international community.
