Improving Students' Listening Comprehension by Teaching Connected Speech

This present research was conducted in order to find out students’ improvement in listening comprehension and to figure out students’ interest in listening increase after being taught the aspects of connected speech. This research used a quantitative method with pre-experimental design, namely one group pretest-posttest model design. The population of this research was all students of the eleventh-grade students who study at MAS Darul Ihsan Islamic Boarding School which amount to 184 students. In addition, the sample of this research was 30 students of class XI.F that was chosen purposively. 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 can improve students’ listening comprehension. This was revealed through the comparison of t-score 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 can increase their interest in learning listening.