Investigating EFL Students’ Responses Towards the use of Pronunciation Practice in Reader’s Theatre

Abstract

The study aims to investigate the students’ responses towards the implementation of Pronunciation practice session in the rehearsal in Reader’s Theater. Data were collected through interviews and observations from the English Department students who joined Reader’s Theater extracurricular activity in a private university in Salatiga. There were six students who had been interviewed for this study and three additional students who had been observed during the rehearsal. To answer the research question, the students were asked about their responses towards the use of Pronunciation practice in Reader’s Theater according to the rehearsal and how oral reading fluency leads to reading comprehension. A content analysis was conducted to find out the pronunciation challenges that the students encountered during the rehearsal and how they dealt with those challenges. The result of this study showed: (1) all students who had been interviewed agreed that Pronunciation practice gave good impact in improving their pronunciation; (2) they repeated reading the text to be accustomed to the difficult pronunciation features in order to achieve oral reading fluency; (3) in relation to the relationship between oral reading fluency and reading comprehension, the students agreed that Pronunciation practice helped them to understand the utterance easily by emphasizing the intonation.