Improving Students’ Listening Comprehension by Teaching Connected Speech

Abstract

This present research was conducted in order to find out the improvement in students’ listening comprehension and to figure out whether students’ interest in listening class increases after being taught the aspects of connected speech. This research used a quantitative method with pre-experimental design, namely pre-test post-test involving only the experiment group. The population of this research was all the students of the eleventh-grade who are studying at MAS Darul Ihsan which amount to 184 students. In addition, the sample of this research was 30 students of class XI F that was chosen using purposive sampling. Moreover, this research used pre-test and post-test as well as questionnaires as data collection instruments. The research found that teaching connected speech in the listening classroom improved students’ listening comprehension. This was indicated by the comparison of t-score which is higher than t-table, (3.61 > 2.04). Therefore, the alternative hypothesis (Ha) was accepted and the null hypothesis (Ho) was rejected. Furthermore, the result of students’ response sheets indicated that students have positive perception toward the teaching connected speech and it can increase their interest in learning listening.

A systematic review of studies on connected speech processing: Trends, key findings, and implications

“…As shown in Table 2 , the subjects selected in the existing CSP studies were mostly adults (88.1%; Dennis and Hess, 2016 ; Wong et al, 2019 ; Chen et al, 2021 ); only few focused on children, among which four studies were on toddlers ( Thompson and Howard, 2007 ; DeVeney and Scheffel, 2019 ; Daneshi et al, 2020 ), five on pre-schoolers ( Camarata, 1993 ; Iacono, 1998 ; Girard et al, 2008 ; Kambanaros, 2014 ; Tang et al, 2019 ), one on primary school children ( Howard, 2013 ), and two on adolescents ( Musfirah et al, 2019 ; Wong et al, 2020 ). The rest were carried out with a wide age range, mainly with groups with developmental disorders; for instance, 20–85-year-old sample with neurogenic communication disorders ( Fromm et al, 2021 ), 9–16-year-old children with speech impairment ( Howard, 2004 ), 21–69-year-old adults with Parkinson’s disease ( Lee et al, 2019 ), 2–10-year-old children with Fragile X Syndrome or Down Syndrome ( Barnes et al, 2009 ), 19–74-year-old patients undergoing left hemisphere resective surgery ( McCarron et al, 2017 ), and 4–8-year-old siblings with hearing loss ( Skoruppa and Rosen, 2014 ).…”

“…At the perception level, these factors include subtitles ( Wong et al, 2020 ), phonological ability ( Wong et al, 2017a ), native language pronunciation rules ( Ernestus et al, 2017 ), semantics ( Shi, 2014 ), the familiarity of the CSPs ( Kennedy and Blanchet, 2014 ), and different sound environments ( Wong et al, 2017b ); at the production level, exposure time ( Ashtiani and Zafarghandi, 2015 ), the phonological overlap of cognates ( Li and Gollan, 2018 ) as well as the differences between the first and second language ( Wong et al, 2019 ) were reported to be significant factors. Furthermore, intervention studies showed that targeted phonological training ( Ahmadian and Matour, 2014 ; Euler, 2014 ) and listening practice ( Musfirah et al, 2019 ) were conducive to improving L2 learners’ connected speech perception and production.…”

“…As shown in Table 2, the subjects selected in the existing CSP studies were mostly adults (88.1%; Dennis and Hess, 2016;Wong et al, 2019;Chen et al, 2021); only few focused on children, among which four studies were on toddlers (Thompson and Howard, 2007;DeVeney and Scheffel, 2019;Daneshi et al, 2020), five on pre-schoolers (Camarata, 1993;Iacono, 1998;Girard et al, 2008;Kambanaros, 2014;Tang et al, 2019), one on primary school children (Howard, 2013), and two on adolescents (Musfirah et al, 2019;Wong et al, 2020). The rest were carried out with a wide age range, mainly The number of reviewed articles of connected speech processing of years.…”

“…As presented in Table 3, a total of 23 papers were empirical studies focusing on non-native speakers; only one involved speakers with developmental disorders (Kambanaros, 2010); five papers tested both native and non-native speakers, and four with mixed native language backgrounds (Euler, 2014;Shi, 2014;Ernestus et al, 2017;Nijveld et al, 2022). Similar to the overall characteristics of the subjects, except for a small number of elderly (Kambanaros, 2010) and adolescent subjects (Musfirah et al, 2019;Wong et al, 2020), most of the subjects of non-native studies were between 18 and 25 years of age, which suggests that these subjects were young adults who may have had many years of FL/SL learning experience. It is apparent that the CSP studies on early childhood and adolescence, also known as the sensitive or critical period for language development (Singleton, 2005), were relatively rare except for the study by Tang et al (2019) which only included preschool children as the control group to compare with adult speakers.…”

Learning Connected Speech by Pronouncing Song Lyrics: Students' Perspective

“…As (Rosa, 2002) pointed out, "working on sentence stress and intonation can help students to better understand spoken English. It is crucial for English learners when they get listening subject because research from Musrifah (2018) assure listening is one of the most difficult skills for foreign language learners. It is caused by the complexity of its process and the different types of knowledge required for successful listening.…”