A study on the relationship between musical aptitude levels and pronunciation skills of EFL learners

The main purpose of the present study is to investigate if there is any relationship between musical aptitude and pronunciation performance, and to what extent musical aptitude, measured by the AMMA, affects judgments of pronunciation performance of EFL learners. This study was conducted at Gaziantep University in the department of English Language Teaching with 51 sophomore students in the 2019-2020 academic year. The data were collected in two phases. Firstly, the participants' musical aptitude levels were measured via AMMA. Secondly, the data for pronunciation were collected through comments on a silent film, and these data were recorded via a voice recorder. Finally, three native English raters judged the pronunciation performance of the participants holistically. In this step, TESOL pronunciation rubric, a component of speaking rubric, was adopted. The current study's data analysis is descriptive in nature. All results were analyzed via Pearson product-moment correlations, independent samples t-tests and one-way ANOVAs. The findings of this correlational study showed that there is a statistically significant moderate positive correlation between participants' musical aptitude and their pronunciation performance. Furthermore, it was found out that musical aptitude explains the success in pronunciation, which is meaningful considering many variables affecting the language learning process. This result pointed out the important role of musical aptitude on foreign language pronunciation ability. The findings supported the idea that music and language are mutually dependent phenomena. Implications and suggestions for further research are given based on the obtained findings. Keywords: Musical aptitude, Foreign language pronunciation, EFL learning, Pronunciation performance