ELTIN JOURNAL: p-ISSN 2339-1561 Journal of English Language Teaching in Indonesia e–ISSN 2580-7684 45 THE USE OF PODCAST TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ LISTENING COMPREHENSION Hania Fadhilatun Nisa*1, Lidyatul Izzah2, Muhamad Sofian Hadi3 1 haniiafadhilla@gmail.com, 2 izzahlidyatul@yahoo.com, 3 m_sofianhadi@yahoo.com 1,2,3UNIVERSITAS MUHAMADIYAH JAKARTA ABSTRACT This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of podcast in improving students’ listening skill. The method used in this research is quantitative method with pre-experimental as a research design. Both the pre-test and post-test were used as instruments in collecting data. The writer used one class in the seventh grade of SMP Muhammadiyah 35 Jakarta as the sample. The data were analyzed statistically using t-test. The results of the analysis show that the mean score of students is 89.4, statistical calculations show the result to (t- observation) > t (t-table) obtained are 17.986 while the Tt value is 1.721 with a significant level of 5% (0.05), because To is higher than Tt, then the alternative hypothesis (Ha) was accepted while the null hypothesis was rejected. From the result of this analysis this study concludes that using Podcast was an effective media to improve students’ listening skills. Keywords: Comprehension, Podcast, Teaching Listening A. INTRODUCTION English is an international language spoken worldwide. More that one billion people worldwide speak English and use it as a second or foreign language. They speak English in order to communicate and understand what information that is being delivered between two or more foreign speakers. This process needs at least one speaker and one listener to communicate and to get the information as well. This process requires English skills and one of them is listening. Listening is defined as the act of listening attentively. Hamouda ( 2012) stated that listening as active listening, which is essential for effective communication. Listening can also be defined as, more that just listening and understanding and interpreting the meaning of a conversation. Thus, the first skill that English learners must be owned is listening. Listening is an important language skill used to develop English students in learning a second language. Listening is the ability to recognize and understanding it’s meaning. It builds learners’ compatibility in their understanding of the language. In other words, the power of listening leads us to catch the pure meaning of the information. It can be concluded that listening skill is important for the learners to be mastered. However, although important, listening is considered the most difficult language skills to learn. The importance of listening in language learning should not be overstated. Through acceptance, we internalize linguistic information without which we cannot produce language. Because the role of listening mailto:1 Nisa, Izzah & Hadi: The Use of Podcast to Improve … 46 comprehension in language teaching has been emphasized over and over again, many English students do not play enough attention to its importance in their classrooms. In general, there are several factors that influence students’ hearing comprehension. First, students face many difficulties in mastering vocabulary. Second, students have limited time to learn English, the problem also stems from the quality of the cassette or diskette. The tape may be recorded when there is sound, so the quality is outdated. Inadequate equipment is somehow an obstacle for students in listening. So, this is the place for students to listening in the lab room. This willgive better results as outside noise cannot enter the laboratory room. The good cassette recorder or CD player may provide it better than the old one. Listening is tought by the teacher only once a month. Third, students feel bored and not motivated to learn. They tend not to pay attention when the teacher explains the material. In this modern era, practicing English listening skill can be done anytime, anywhere and anyhow. One of the reasons is the existence of Spotify, digital music, podcast, and video streaming songs and other content from artist around the world. English while practicing their listening skill. They can choose one English learning podcast and listen to it while developing their knowladge. However, not all the learners will understand the content the same as other learners. One can understand whole content for one time playing the podcast, one can understand half of the contant, or not at all. The problem that is discussed by the researcher in this thesis is the “Effectiveness of Using Podcast in Teaching Listenig Comprehension” Based on the background above, researchers limit the study about “The Effectiveness of Using Podcast in teaching listening comprehension”. Thus, this research focused to analyze about the effectiveness of the Podcast on Spotify apply in teaching learnning activity to build up students’ listening comprehension. 1. Listening In Indonesia, classes are taught in English as a foreign language from elementary school to university. Students are expected to have basic skill in reading, speaking, and listening in English. Listening is the hardest one of all. Thus, Listening is an important aspect of communicating with others. Vasiljevic (2010) stated that listening is used by more than 45%in communication, which clearly demonstrates the importance of these skills in overall language skill. In recent years, when listening is not only related to comprehension but also to language learning, listening has been considered from another perspective. Listening teaching requires more teachers than students. What of the main principles of listening teaching is that language materials must be used to practice listening comprehension, and they must not be presented visually first. Therefore, listening to audio is a good tool to achieve this goal. Therefore, listening comprehension convers the various processes involved in understanding and understanding spoken English. This includes recognizing speech, understanding the meaning of individual words, and / or understanding the grammar of the sentences that convey them. Listening comprehension may also involve prosody with verbal expression (for example, the expected meaning of the statement can be turned into a question), and draw relevant conclusions based on the speaker's background, real-world knowledge, and specific attributes (for example, the speaker can obtain what information and what he or she may discuss. For long-term language or discourse, listening comprehension also involves a large amount of memory requirements to detect the causality expressed in the discourse. ELTIN Journal: Journal of English Language Teaching in Indonesia, Volume 10/No 1, April 2022 47 In addition, Antony et al., (2012) stated that whether asleep or waking up, humans continue to process sound; i.e. vibrations pass through our ears and are processed in our brain continuously. According to Hamouda (2013), listening skills are an important element in obtaining understandable input. Learning will not happen if there is no input. Jafari & Hashim (2015) emphasize that listening is a channel for understandable input and more than 50 percent of the time spent by students to learn a foreign language is devoted to listening. According to Gilakjani & Ahmadi (2011), listening plays an important role in the communication process. Ferris (1998), Murphy (1991), Vogely (1998) and Hamouda, (2013) revealed that listening is the most commonly sed skill in the language classroom. Therefore, it is clear that listening is very important to students’ lives because listening is used as a learning tool at all teaching levels. Although interested in foreign language learning, the teaching of listening comprehension is ignored in many EFL classrooms. Pourhossein (cited in Gilakjani & Ahmadi, 2011) that listening includes listening to thoughts, feelings and intentions and this requires active involvement, effort and training. Listening comprehension is useful for student speech. This means that as students are more exposed to spoken English, they can better understand and understand tone, intonation, stress, redundancy, and group. Furthermore, from what mentioned above, the researcher concluded listening skills are very important in foreign language learning because the key to language learning is to accept language input. Thus, the process of listening comprehension provides useful intuition in listening instruction. It helps student understand the context of school material in a form of audio and even better to other skill such as reading and speaking. Because the development of listening comprehension can help students succeed in language learning, thereby enhancing understandable input. 2. Components of Listening The term ‘hearing’ is mostly confused with ‘hearing’, although hearing may or may not be conscious of hearing in general. The listening process begins with conscious listening and is an important step in the listening process. Thus, because hearing is complicated then it needs various components that will lead to understanding. According to Goh (2000) Identify this component as follows: a. Distinguish sounds. b. Criticize the word. c. Identify grammatical word groups. d. Identify the "pragmatic unit". e. Associate linguistic signals with paralinguistic signals (intonation and stress) and non-linguistic signals (signals and objects relevant to the situation) to construct meaning. f. Use knowledge of background and context to predict and confirm meaning g. Remember important words and ideas. In addition, according to Hermawan (2012), the influencing factors can be divided into two, namely internal factors and external factors: a. Internal factors effects the listening process are: hearing problems and physical condition. If someone has a hearing impairment or a damaged hearing device, a cairtain amount of waves can be prevented from entering, and the hearing process will be interrupted. Nisa, Izzah & Hadi: The Use of Podcast to Improve … 48 b. External factors includes environmental factors, material factors, speakers, style and oral skills. The subjects will affect the listening process. Listeners will be more interested in new material than in known or experienced materials. The speaker factor can also disturb the audience’s attention. For example, an experience and calm speakers will be more persuasive than a nervous speaker. In addition, the presentation, appearance, and technology the material may also be one of the factors that affect the listening process such the visualization and technology used. Constantine (2007) mentions that a podcast is the name of a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program. Podcast are published on the internet as mp3 and mp4 files. The advent of podcast on the internet has provided language teachers with a gold mine for teaching listening skills. Podcast can be two to three minutes and an hour long. English teachers can subscribe to podcasts by subscription when there is a new episode available, it will be downloaded to the computer automatically. Moreover, it is not charged to the customer. Because podcast content is free, teachers now have a way to build a large listening library for their students based on contemporary and relevant topics. English teachers can also encourage students to download their own podcasts so they have more listening input. In addition, Kavaliauskienė (2008) claims that there is an opportunity to increase language awareness by using podcasting that allows students to do homework, and assignments, at their own pace and in non-threatening conditions. B. METHOD This study is categorized as a quantitative method using a pre-experimental study. Quantitative research methods are methods in which numbers are used to explain findings (Kowalczyk, 2016). The pre-experimental design is chosen because this design aims to understand the effect of the effectiveness of using podcast in teaching listening comprehension. In this study, quantitative research was conducted in a pre-test and post-test design group. This study selected the grade-7th in junior high school at SMP 35 Muhammadiyah Jakarta as the sample of this research. According to Creswell (2012), samples are target population groups that researchers have chosen to collect target population data. The population of this study is 75 students at first junior high school students in Jakarta, Indonesia. The data sample consists of one class, namely 25 students of class VII SMP Muhammdiyah 35 Jakarta in the school year 2020/2021. In collecting data, the researcher used the students’ listening test as an instrument of the study. Students were given a pre-test in the first meeting. They listened to a learning material podcast and given some test. Then, the result were noted as the development of their listening skill until the end of the test. Data were collected from the instrument in the form of 30 multiple choice items for pre-test. Then, in analyzing the data, statistical data formulas are required in relation to the methods used. In analyzing the data, the t-test was used to test the significance. C. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION This section reports the findings of the research. These findings are based on the data which were analysed in this research was the result of the test. The participants of this research, those are the eleven grades in SMP Muhammadiyah 35 Jakarta in academic year 2020/2021 were answered the test completely. The data shown in this section is collected from students’ scores before and after the listening test. The analysis results are as follows: ELTIN Journal: Journal of English Language Teaching in Indonesia, Volume 10/No 1, April 2022 49 1. The result of students’ pre-test score Pre-test scores data for students of listening comprehension is shown in table 1. Table 1. The Score of Students’ Pre-Test Students Score AN 50 ADH 50 AO 65 AZ 70 AN 65 ADP 60 AZS 75 AA 75 BHR 50 BZ 55 DPP 70 DHA 65 DRG 60 DKG 55 DAG 45 FKS 80 FSP 60 FEP 75 GR 70 JE 45 KNP 55 MDAF 75 ML 75 MNI 70 MSEP 50 N=25 TOTAL: 1565 MEAN: 62.6 From the table 1, it can be shown that 2 students get 45 for their listening score, 4 students get 50 for their listening score, 3 students get 55 for their listening score, 3 students get 60 for their listening score, 3 students get 65 for their listening score, 4 students get 70 for their listening score, 5 students get 75 for their listening score, 1 students get 80 for their listening score. The mean of student’s pre-test result was 93.18 the highest score in pre-test is 80 and the lowest score in pre-test is 45. Table 2. Criteria of Students’ Pre-Test Score Criteria Score Excellent 5 (90-100) Good 4 (76-89) Enough 3 (66-75) Poor 2 (40-65) Very Poor 1 (00-39) Nisa, Izzah & Hadi: The Use of Podcast to Improve … 50 Based on the criteria written in table 2, the data can be categorized as follows: Table 3. Criteria of Students’ Pre-Test Result Criteria of Students Total Number of Students Total Number of Students in Percentage Excellent 0 0% Good 1 4% Enough 9 36% Poor 15 60% Very Poor 0 0% TOTAL 25 100% The table 3 reveals that 1 student (4%) was good, 9 students (36%) were enough, 15 students(60%) were poor and no one student were excellent and very poor . 2. The result of students’ post-test score The data of students’ post-test Scores of listening which is obtained into tables as follow: Table 4. The Score of Students’ Post-Test Students Score AN 90 ADH 90 AO 85 AZ 95 AN 90 ADP 80 AZS 100 AA 95 BHR 80 BZ 80 DPP 100 DHA 80 DRG 85 DKG 95 DAG 80 FKS 100 FSP 85 FEP 95 GR 95 JE 80 KNP 85 MDAF 90 ML 95 MNI 95 MSEP 90 N=25 TOTAL: 2235 MEAN: 89.4 ELTIN Journal: Journal of English Language Teaching in Indonesia, Volume 10/No 1, April 2022 51 From the table 4, it can be shown that 6 students get 80 for their listening score, 4 students get 85 for their listening score, 5 students get 90 for listening score, 7 students get 95 for their listening score, 3 students get 100 for their listening score, the mean of student’s post-test result was 93.18 the highest score in post-test is 100 and the lowest score in post- test is 80. Table 5. Criteria of Student Post-Test Result Criteria of Students Total Number of Students Total Number of Students in Percentage Excellent 15 60% Good 10 40% Enough 0 0% Poor 0 0% Very Poor 0 0% TOTAL 25 100% The table 5 shows that 15 students (60% ) were excellent 10 students (40% ) were good, and no one student were enough, poor, and very poor. 3. The analysis of the data The data was analyzed by using t-test to determine whether there was a significant between student writing skills in pre and post-test. The pre-test was given before the treatment begins and the post-test is given after the treatment finish. Table 6 presents the student’s listening comprehension in the experimental class before the researcher does her experiment (pre-test). In addition, also present the students’ listening comprehension after the researcher does her experiment (post-test) in the experimental class. Table 6. Statistical Table of Students’ Pre-Test and Post-Test No. Students Pre- Test Xi Post- Test Xj (Xj- Xi) �̅� ((𝑿𝒋 − 𝑿𝒊 − 𝑫 ̅) ((Xj- Xi)- �̅�)2 1 AN 50 90 40 26.8 13.2 174.24 2 ADH 50 90 40 26.8 13.2 174.24 3 AO 65 85 20 26.8 -6.8 46.24 4 AZ 70 95 25 26.8 -1.8 3.24 5 AN 65 90 25 26.8 -1.8 3.24 6 ADP 60 80 20 26.8 -6.8 46.24 7 AZS 75 100 25 26.8 -1.8 3.24 8 AA 75 95 20 26.8 -6.8 46.24 9 BHR 50 80 30 26.8 3.2 10.24 10 BZ 55 80 25 26.8 -1.8 3.24 11 DPP 70 100 30 26.8 3.2 10.24 12 DHA 65 80 15 26.8 -11.8 139.24 13 DRG 60 85 25 26.8 -1.8 3.24 14 DKG 55 95 40 26.8 13.2 174.24 15 DAG 45 80 35 26.8 8.2 67.24 Nisa, Izzah & Hadi: The Use of Podcast to Improve … 52 Based on the table above, it can be seen that the mean score of pre-test is 62.5 and the mean score of post-test is 83.46 from 26.8. Based on the result, it can be concluded that the use of podcast gave greater contribution in teaching listening comprehension. After the results of the above-mentioned students’ pre-test and post-test, the author analyzed the results to determine the effectiveness of using podcast for listening comprehension on spotify. The author made the following calculations according to the steps of the t-test formula: Based on the calculation above, the T calculation 17.986 and t table with degree of freedom (df) 24 obtained obtained 1.721. the significance value of less than 0.05 and T calculation > T table and the significance of using podcast as an effective in teaching listening comprehension. Since to was higher than tt score obtained from the result of the calculation, the positive hypothesis (H1) can be accepted while the negative hypothesis (H0) was rejected. It can be seen from the students’ post test scores (89.4) which is higher than their pretest (62.5). The significance score of students’ listening test result, which was higher than 0,05 showed that Using Podcast gives significant effect to influence students’ listening of 7th grade students’ of SMP Muhammadiyah 35 Jakata in academic year of 2020/2021. Students Pre- Test Xi Post- Test Xj (Xj- Xi) �̅� ((𝑿𝒋 − 𝑿𝒊 − 𝑫 ̅) ((Xj- Xi)- �̅�)2 16 FKS 80 100 20 26.8 -6.8 46.24 17 FSP 60 85 25 26.8 -1.8 3.24 18 FEP 75 95 20 26.8 -6.8 46.24 19 GR 70 95 25 26.8 -1.8 3.24 20 JE 45 80 35 26.8 8.2 67.24 21 KNP 55 85 30 26.8 3.2 10.24 22 MDAF 75 90 15 26.8 -11.8 139.24 23 ML 75 95 20 26.8 -6.8 46.24 24 MNI 70 95 25 26.8 -1.8 3.24 25 MSEP 50 90 40 26.8 13.2 174.24 Total 1565 2235 670 0 1444 Mean 62.5 89.4 26.8 t-test one group = 𝑡 = �̅� 𝑆𝐷 √𝑛 𝑆𝐷 = √𝑉𝑎𝑟 𝑉𝑎𝑟 (𝑆 2) = 1 𝑛 − 1 ∑ 𝑛 𝑖=1 (𝑥1 − �̅�) 2 ELTIN Journal: Journal of English Language Teaching in Indonesia, Volume 10/No 1, April 2022 53 D. CONCLUSION After analyzing the data, several conclusions can be inferred. First, the result shows that the avarage of Pre-Test was 62.5 and Post-Test was 89.4. It can be seen from the students’ progress between Pre-Test and Post-Test.The value of Tcalculation (17.986) was higher than the value of Ttable (1.721) at the significance level of 5%. It can be concluded that null hypothesis (H0) was rejected and alternative hypothesis (H1) was accepted. It means the use of podcast gives a significant effect on students’ listening skill of seventh grade students in SMP Muhammadiyah 35 Jakarta. Therefore, it is recommended that the teachers use podcast in teaching listening in the classroom. REFERENCES Antony, J. W., Gobel, E. W., O’hare, J. K., Reber, P. J., & Paller, K. A. (2012). Cued memory reactivation during sleep influences skill learning. Nature Neuroscience, 15(8), 1114– 1116. Constantine, P. (2007). Podcasts: another source for listening input. The Internet TESL Journal, 13(1), 143–156. Creswell, J. W. (2012). 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