THE IMPACT OF CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS BASED PRONUNCIATION TEACHING ON IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS' LISTENING COMPREHENSION

The present study has made an attempt to investigate the impact of contrastive based pronunciation teaching on listening comprehension ability of Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, the participants were chosen based on their performance in an OPT test. Participants with the score of 1SD above and below the mean (1SD +/- Mean) were selected to conduct the study. For the first step, participants were divided into experimental and control group. Then in the second step, pre-test on listening comprehension was administered with both groups. Unlike the control group, the experimental one received four-week contrastive based pronunciation teaching includes segmental features and errors made by learners. After four-week treatment post-test was conducted and the results were entered into SPSS and analyzed through inferential statistics (t-test) and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). The result showed significant difference between both groups in terms of their development. The finding of the study indicated that using contrastive based pronunciation teaching can improve the listening comprehension ability of EFL learners.