UNCOVERING THE MYTH ABOUT THE LINK BETWEEN PRONUNCIATION AND LISTENING COMPREHENSION

Abstract

Pronunciation and listening comprehension are two areas of English proficiency that are often assumed to have a reciprocal relationship. Owing to the authors’ experiences, it was not uncommon to find English language educators who claimed that the higher one’s command of pronunciation, the better their listening comprehension, or vice versa. Even though such opinion seems to be well aligned with common logical perspectives, it is likely that it was based on presumptions rather than evidence from research. The two areas have been the object of research for years; however, they are not often discussed as a package. This research tries to unveil the pronunciation-listening comprehension myth by performing statistical correlation tests between the participants' level of pronunciation accuracy and listening comprehension test performance within a two-set data analysis. This study's findings highlight that, in the first test, there was a statistically significant correlation between the number of correct answers in the listening test and the percentage of correctly pronounced words in the reading-aloud procedure. However, in the second test, the correlation between the two variables was not found statistically significant. While there were hints of the alleged relationship between pronunciation and listening skills, the inconsistency between the results of the two tests could not support the claim about the contribution of each skill to the other.