CORRELATION BETWEEN LISTENING ABILITY AND PRONUNCIATION ABILITY OF 8TH GRADE STUDENTS AT SMP ISLAM MANBAUL ULUM GRESIK

Listening ability is important to the students because it not only helps understand what people are saying, but it also helps speak clearly with others. The listener comprehension of communication depends on speakers pronunciation. Meanwhile, pronunciation ability clearly is important because it makes someone understand the right pronunciation and makes the target speaker understand the meaning of the word or the sentence. But, most of students have difficulty in listening ability and pronunciation ability. In listening ability, they do not recognize the word or the sentence and they have hearing problems. On the contrary, in pronunciation ability, they cannot pronounce the word and the sentence well, they feel ashamed and afraid to speak or pronounce English words. So, the researcher gives the test to the students on both of them. Here, the researcher wants to know whether there is correlation between listening ability and pronunciation ability. That is why, this study is to find the relationship between listening and pronunciation ability of 8th grade at SMP Islam Manbaul Ulum Gresik. This is Quantitative study which is needed in correlational study. 32 learners of VIII B are the sample of this study. They are 8th grade learners at SMP Islam Manbaul Ulum Gresik. The scores of listening test and pronunciation test were used as the instrument. The data were collected then analyzed by using statistical computation of SPSS. All of the data was not from normal distribution, it analyzed by using Spearman Correlation. From the calculation, it is positive and medium correlation between listening ability and pronunciation ability (r=0.336). Furthermore, the p-value was 0.660. It means, there was significance correlation between listening ability and pronunciation ability of 8th grade at SMP Islam Manbaul Ulum Gresik. It means that, if the students listening ability is better, it can improve their pronunciation better. Finally, since the result of this study is positively, medium, significantly correlated, it is suggested to conduct studies which aim to find best activities to improve both listening and pronunciation. There are some suggestions for the teachers, they can more improve the model of teaching in listening and pronunciation ability of the students. So that, the students can be a good listener and speaker. For the students, the researcher suggests that the students more improve their skill in English. For the next researcher, the researcher suggests that the next researcher to develop their research to make a good research