PENGUASAAN MENDISKRIMINASIKAN PASANGAN MINIMAL BUNYI HURUF ARAB DALAM KALANGAN PELAJAR MELAYU

Inabilities in mastering listening skills affect learners to differentiate sounds which are similar to the sounds of their native language or referred to as minimal pair. This situation will also affect students in well discriminating the sound of the letters for the minimal pair when they are at the beginning of the word and the end of the word. Hence, this study aims to identify the mastery of Malay students in discriminating minimal pair of Arabic letters in the beginning and at the end of the word. The study uses a quantitative methodology, involving 33 Malay students in Universiti Putra Malaysia who have no basic in Arabic language. The instrument used is a discrimination test built on PRAAT software. The test data was analyzed descriptively using Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS) based on Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM). The results of the analysis show that the pairing of the letters Thā -Sīn, Ṣād-Sīn and Dhāl-Zāy are the most difficult to be discriminated in the beginning of the word. Meanwhile, the pairing of the letters Ḥā -Hā , Ayn-Hamzah and Ṣād-Sīn were found to be most difficult to discriminate if at the end of the word.