The Correlation between Students’ Habit in Listening to Authentic Materials and their Listening Skill of Eleventh Grade Students at SMKN 2 Pekanbaru

Abstract

This study was motivated by the fact that many eleventh-grade students at SMKN 2 Pekanbaru have not developed consistent habits of listening to authentic materials. The use of authentic materials is believed to provide exposure to natural language use, including pronunciation, intonation, and real speech patterns. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the correlation between students’ habit of listening to authentic materials and their listening skill. This study employed a quantitative method with a correlational design. The participants were 128 eleventh-grade students selected through random sampling. Data were collected using two instruments: a questionnaire consisting of 20 Likert-scale items to measure students’ habit of listening to authentic materials, and a listening test consisting of 20 true–false items to assess students’ listening skill. The data were analyzed using Kendall’s tau-b correlation. The results showed that there was no significant correlation between students’ habit of listening to authentic materials and their listening skill, with a negligible positive correlation (τ = 0.022, p = 0.731). This finding indicates that students’ habit of listening to authentic materials was not significantly correlated with their listening skill. These findings suggest that improving students’ listening skill may require not only the development of listening habits but also the integration of effective learning strategies, structured teacher guidance, and more sustained exposure to authentic materials.