The Effect of Reading Aloud on Listening Comprehension of EFL Learners

Abstract

Reading aloud helps students learn how to read and improve their reading comprehension in classes. Reading aloud has been confronted with continuous debate during the last few decades. Reading aloud, however, has more benefits than disadvantages, and even there were many attempts to reveal the effect on other language skills. Listening and reading are linked closely on the reception and processing of incoming data. Reading aloud provides learners with basic language techniques such as pronunciation, pitch, tone, and punctuation, and it leads to the improvement of their language ability. The present study explored the effect of reading aloud effect on EFL learners in Korea. Two research questions were in it. One is whether Korean adult EFL learners acquire benefits of reading aloud in their listening comprehension. The other one is whether the advantage of reading aloud influenced differently on learners’ language levels. A total of 139 university students participated in the study. All subjects were divided into two groups: seventy-two students were in the control group and sixty-seven students were in the experiment group. Experiment group consisted of two subgroups according to their language levels: thirty-four was in the low level and thirty-three was in the high level. The experiment group was asked to submit their recording files once at a time for 6 weeks during a semester. The recording assignment was reading aloud the listening part 3 and 4 of TOEIC. There were two tests: pretest of part 1 and 2 of TOEIC, posttest of part 3 and 4 of TOEIC. Pretest was easier than posttest, so ANCOVA and standardization were employed to examine the effect. All data were analyzed by SPSS 21.0. Experiment group outperformed in posttest, and it meant that reading aloud affected on EFL learners’ listening comprehension. It also verified that reading aloud influenced on the improvement of adult learners' listening comprehension skills. In the regard with language levels, low level students outperformed high level students even though a few high level students showed outstanding effects on their posttest. The findings of this study showed that reading aloud affect on EFL learners regardless their ages and listening comprehension levels. Reading aloud can improve students' listening comprehension not only in classes but also outside of the class as assignments. This research contributes to the opening of the possibility of integrating between reading and listening skills to enhance EFL students’ language competence by using reading aloud as assignments.