The Correlation Between Students’ Pronunciation Skills And Their Speaking Ability In The Fourth Semester of English DepartmentAt University of Islam Malang

Abstract

English is a universal language that is spoken as a second or foreign language in many nations including Indonesia. Many students encounter various challenges when studying English in the classroom during the teaching and learning process. Speaking is one of the challenges that students have when learning English. The researcher correlates it with pronunciation in order to solve this problem. The purpose of this study is to determine whether speaking ability and pronunciation mastery among students were correlated. In this study, the researcher used quantitative research. The sample of this research was 56 students who chosen from the students of fourth semester of English Department at Universitas Islam Malang. This research was included pronunciation test and document’s speaking score test as the instruments. Product Moment Pearson by applying IBM SPSS version 20.0 was used as data analysis. The findings showed that there is correlation between pronunciation skills and the students speaking ability because the significant value was 0.00. It is lower than 0.05. In other word, the result of correlation coefficient in this research was 0.859. It showed that the coefficient on interval 0.80-1.00 which interpreted the correlation was on a very high correlation. It means that the correlation between two variables are significant. As Tussa’adah (2013) stated that pronunciation become important aspect in speaking. When we speak we not just need a great deal of vocabulariy and good grammar, we also need pronunciation to produce sound of the words that we used in communication. Based on the result showed, pronunciations skills is an important factor for students who want to have a good speaking. Pronunciation skills helps students to speak easier. It implies that pronunciations can improve speaking ability. Keywords: Correlation, Pronunciation Skills, Speaking Ability.