The Correlation Between Listening and Speaking Ability of the Fifth Semester Students of English Education Department of Muria Kudus University in the Academic Year 2010/2011

As an international language, English is very important to communicate with other people in the world. In a communication process, the interlocutors involve in listening and speaking activity to express the feelings or thoughts. The fifth semester Students have to be quite well to practice listening and speaking. They have been training those abilities intensively. Listening is more than merely hearing words. It is actively involve on the topic of communication (Subyakto, 1998). Meanwhile, Speaking is tool used for conveying message or aims to arrange and growth with concord the needs of hearers or listeners (Tarigan, 1991). Speaking is one of skills that should get more attention because there are many students who get some difficulties in expressing their idea orally. The writer wonders weather their listening ability correlates to their speaking ability or not. In doing so, this research purpose is to find out the correlation between listening and speaking ability of the fifth semester students of English Education Department of Muria Kudus University in Academic Year 2010/2011. This is descriptive quantitative research. The listening and speaking ability of the fifth semester students of English Education Department of Muria Kudus University are as the data and the score of listening and speaking test are as the data source. Then, the data are analyzed by using Pearson Correlation Product Moment Formula to know the correlation between the listening and speaking ability. The writer obtain that the listening ability of the fifth semester students is in fair criteria which has mean score 67.16 and the speaking ability is in fair criteria also which has mean score 70.91 To know the correlation of them, the writer calculates each score and gets rxy = 0.798. Ali (1984:188) states that the score is in the range score of high correlation. At the end of this research, the writer suggests that the lecturers especially in teaching speaking subject should correlate with listening awareness, the English Education Department should supply various listening input such as cassette, sound record, and video as the materials that can be learned by the students autonomously, the students should recognize this correlation so that they can hear English sound a lot in order to improve their speaking ability. In other case, the students should speak or communicate with others by using English. It is useful effort to check their listening ability in the process of communication