The Role of Listening Skill on Improving English Language Learners Pronunciation Level at the School of Languages University of the Holy Qur'an and Islamic Science.

Abstract

This study particularly aimed at investigating some students’ attitudes toward listening skill and the role it plays on improving their pronunciation level. It targeted 2nd year students studying English Language at the School of Languages, University of the Holy Qur’an & Islamic Science. The major objectives of the study could be summarized in the following points:  Discovering whether listening practice improves pronunciation.  Realizing how effective the audio-visuals are in practicing listening in and outside classroom.  Indicating what pedagogical challenges facing listening practice.  Emphasizing the role of listening skill on pronunciation improvement. The method used is a descriptive and analytic method because the study is mainly based on collecting precise data concerning the current status of the phenomenon and eventually to draw conclusion from the result obtained. The researcher used two questionnaires as data gathering tools. The data obtained of course, represent the subjects’ attitudes toward the problem under the study. For the analysis and interpretation of the raw data a statistical method was used via an application of the SPSS (Statistical Packages for Social Sciences). Having analyzed the data, research 3 hypotheses were carefully tested against the findings available. The study eventually concluded the following points: Listening skill plays a crucial role in language learning as it provides not only a means of receiving language sounds but also contributes greatly to the ways how these sounds can properly be pronounced.

Although listening is not the most ignored language skill at the School of Languages, it has rather small representation in the general teaching programs and faces problems of tools shortage and lack in adequate listening materials.

The study also concluded that carrying out listening beyond classroom boundaries e.g. listening to TV’s education-based programs, radios and talking to native speakers enable language learners not only acquire proper accent and intonation but also ameliorate individual words pronunciation.  It was found that, teacher’s responsibility toward pronunciation improvement exceeds his traditional role of retaining the old methods of hearing the basic language sounds to include such factors as necessity to combine textual information with audio-visuals supports, understanding learners’ needs in each stage, carrying out a continuous follow-up with serious intention to pursue the entire objective of improvement and finally having a systematic assessment to diagnose areas of weakness to remedy.