Indonesian EFL Journal (IEFLJ) p-ISSN 2252-7427, e-ISSN 2541-3635 Volume 9, Issue 1, January 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/IEFLJ/index 43 EXPLORING EFL STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF THE USE OF PODCASTS/TED TALKS IN EXTENSIVE LISTENING CLASS Muhammad Handi Gunawan English Education Study Program, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Bandung, Indonesia Email: handi_gunawan@upi.edu Indra Cipta Putra Mandiri English Education Study Program, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Bandung, Indonesia Email: indra18@upi.edu Didi Suherdi English Education Study Program, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Bandung, Indonesia Email: suherdi_d@upi.edu Eisha Sabila Dieni Hanifa English Education Study Program, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Bandung, Indonesia Email: eishasabila2@upi.edu Aninda Putri Gunawan English Education Study Program, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Bandung, Indonesia Email: anindapegee@upi.edu APA Citation: Gunawan, M. H., Mandiri, I. C. P., Suherdi, D., Hanifa, E. S. D., & Gunawan, A. P. (2023). Exploring EFL students’ perceptions of the use of podcasts/TED Talks in extensive listening class. Indonesian EFL Journal, 9(1), 43-52. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v9i1.7486. Received: 09-09-2022 Accepted: 27-11-2022 Published: 30-01-2023 INTRODUCTION Extensive listening can be described as “... all types of listening activities that allow learners to receive a lot of comprehensible and enjoyable listening input.” (Ivone & Renandya, 2019). Under the context of English language teaching, the concept of Extensive listening is a comparatively new concept in comparison to its “brother” concept, extensive reading. It is worthwhile to note that listening to itself, as a language skill, receives relatively smaller teaching and research attention, in comparison with other prevalent language skills (Burns & Siegel, 2018). The concept of extensive listening itself quite possibly started its development from the pre-existing concept of extensive reading (ER). There is also a possibility that it is also developed from the novel concept of L1 listening (Chang, 2018). Regardless of its origin, it is generally agreed that extensive listening is beneficial to the increase of listening comprehension of its practitioners, as it allows them to adjust their listening activities to their preferred type of text, and their specific comprehension needs (Ivone & Renandya, 2019). With the above concepts taken into account, it can easily be concluded that extensive listening Abstract: Podcasts and TED Talks are currently the most widely used resources to facilitate extensive listening activities. Students can benefit greatly from the scaffolding provided by podcasts/TED Talks as they practise extensive listening. In light of the demographics of Indonesian EFL students, this article aims to perform a qualitative analysis of EFL students' perceptions on the usage of podcasts/TED Talks as resources for their extensive listening activities. The primary information of the analysis comes from a post-course reflection questionnaire that was given out. The experiences that the students had during the course are the main focus of this reflective questionnaire. Five of the 23 students were picked for an interview to further discuss their questionnaire responses. The findings of the study revealed that students have largely positive views of using podcasts/TED Talks inside and outside the classroom. The students perceived that listening to podcasts/TED Talks gives them freedom of choosing the topics, flexibility in strengthening their listening skills, and motivation to learn more about listening. Keywords: extensive listening; podcast; TED Talks mailto:indra18@upi.edu mailto:suherdi_d@upi.edu mailto:eishasabila2@upi.edu mailto:anindapegee@upi.edu Muhammad Handi Gunawan, Indra Cipta Putra Mandiri, Didi Suherdi, Eisha Sabila Dieni Hanifa, & Aninda Putri Gunawan Exploring EFL students’ perceptions of the use of podcasts/TED Talks in extensive listening class 44 activities involve the act of listening to large amounts of motivating and engaging materials which are linguistically appropriate over a period of time, in which they listen to materials with a reasonable speed for general understanding (Renandya & Jacobs, 2016). With this, we can determine that in general, extensive listening is an engaging listening activity where attaining a general understanding of what is being spoken serves as the main emphasis and/or focus of the activity. Renandya and Farrell (2011) had previously argued that Extensive Listening is an oral version of the pre-existing concept of Extensive Reading. With that taken into account, Extensive Listening also complies with the predetermined principles of Extensive Reading as dictated by Day and Bamford (2002), specifically, EL complies with the following principles: Table 1. Extensive listening principles No Principle Elaboration 1 Extensive listening means that there needs to be plentiful availability of listening materials that covers a wide range of topics. Language learners and EL practitioners should have access to a multitude of listening materials with varying topics outside of the classroom. This can be through the means of the internet (through Podcasts and Youtube, for example). 2 Extensive Listening should allow its practitioners to choose their preferred audio/ material to be listened to. Language learners and EL practitioners should have the autonomy to freely choose their material(s) at their own convenience and/or based on their specific listening needs. 3 Extensive Listening’s main purposes should be centred around: listening for pleasure, listening for information, and listening for general understanding. Language learners and practitioners of Extensive Listening place a much larger emphasis on inferring meaning based on the presented context. This means that practitioners need to engage with complete spoken texts. 4 Extensive Listening is a meaning-making activity. Language learners and Extensive Listening practitioners aim their focus on understanding the gist or discourse of materials they are listening to. This means that the practitioners construe meaning from a certain perspective. Among the most readily available, and numerous extensive listening resources that are on the internet are videos, sourced from various video hosting sites like Youtube, Dailymotion, and others. With the nature of these videos and resources, these materials can be considered authentic E-Learning resources (Kobayashi, 2020). Watching authentic English videos like these can be considered one of the ways students can practise their listening skills outside of the classroom (Metruk, 2018). Since these videos are able to be perceived as enjoyable listening input, many previous researchers had also suggested the implementation of these videos for varying effects. Saputra (2018) explores the possibility of using these talks to promote autonomy in learning. In support of that, Kobayashi (2020) classifies TED talk videos as authentic materials to foster learning autonomy. TED talks cover a wide array of topics, resulting in intriguing finds for students (Yue & Song, 2020), which means that it can align itself as needed to a course’s needs. In support of this, Wingrove (2017) stated that due to TED talks’ variation of available and accessible topics, it is applicable in various ranges of academic listening applications (Liu & Chen, 2019; Wingrove, 2017). In addition to the previous points, with TED talks serving as visual aids in the extensive listening activity, the practitioners' listening comprehension may also be helped as they are assisted with visual aids in the activity (Lee et al., 2015). Several benefits (thanks to the aforementioned point) naturally birth positive boons, including (but not limited to): A way of implementing a comprehensive approach to learning, and significantly increasing learner’s motivation to learn a foreign language (Zhdanov & Baklanov, 2020). A previous study conducted by Saputra and Fatimah (2018) argued that extensive listening activities allow the students to receive abundant comprehensible and enjoyable input (sourced from sources like youtube, TED, etc). With the aforementioned arguments and the rising popularity of videos as learning tools, the use of videos may be considered one of the best ways to increase English listening comprehension. The role of a teacher here is to merely act as a motivator and a course programmer, encouraging the students to listen extensively to obtain valuable experiences and meaningful insight (Saputra & Fatimah, 2018). Listening, possibly due to its nature of receiving relatively smaller teaching or research attention, in comparison with its peers, is considered to be a particularly difficult skill to acquire for language learners (Nawir, 2020). This is because, in listening, extra attention and concentration are deemed crucial points for comprehending the utterances of the other speaker(s) (Zulfikar et al., 2020). In support of the previous idea, Renandya and Farrell (2011) illustrated four reasons why listening is perceived to be a difficult skill to be nurtured by language learners: (1) speech is fast, as the normal speech rate of those who have English as their first language could be perceived as being too fast by beginner language learners, even more Indonesian EFL Journal (IEFLJ) p-ISSN 2252-7427, e-ISSN 2541-3635 Volume 9, Issue 1, January 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/IEFLJ/index 45 so by non-native speakers of English. This means that if one of the speakers speaks too fast, comprehension problems may appear, especially for those who are not native speakers of the English language, or those who are not used to being exposed to spoken English (Saraswaty, 2018). (2) Speech is variable, as when words are woven into a speech, they will oftentimes undergo (up to some extent, radical) phonological changes (e.g. modification, reduction, et cetera). Third, word boundaries tend to get blurry, as in some words could seemingly “blend” with other words in certain dialects or speech rates. Lastly, speech is by nature processed in real-time, meaning that unlike reading something, there is little to no chance to “re-read” what one may have missed, although the option of asking the interlocutor to repeat the sentence is viable. Previous studies conducted under listening in academic contexts mainly focused on exploring difficulties that learners encounter in listening activities. A study conducted by Nushi and Orouji (2020) revealed that for learners, perceiving phonological processes such as assimilation, deletion, or addition of sounds poses a significant difficulty for their listening. In addition to that, it was also found that attempting to comprehend considerably lengthy and/or comparatively complex materials also serves as a difficulty. Another research was also conducted by Nadhira and Warni (2021), providing more insight into the difficulties that learners face. These include the presence of unfamiliar words in the material, the speaker’s rate of speech and accent, and general technicalities around the use of the material. Another study by Rakhman et al. (2019) mirrors the results of the previously-mentioned study, specifically the difficulty of dealing with the speech rate of the speakers. Additional difficulties were also revealed, namely difficulties related to the inadequate practice of listening outside the classroom, and difficulties in recalling spoken information. Under the context of extensive listening studies, in her EFL college class, Takaesu (2013) looked into the usage of TED lectures as EL resources. She paid close attention to how these materials affected her pupils' listening abilities and lower-proficiency students' listening techniques. Students claimed that the TED-mediated lectures improved their listening comprehension, increased their motivation, and helped them get acclimated to listening to spoken English with varied accents, according to the qualitative data from two surveys and the students' journal entries. With the aforementioned in mind, it can clearly be seen that the big focus in listening– and extensive listening studies are centred around the challenges and difficulties present in the activity, while extensive listening studies focus on resources like TED, which are by nature video-assisted. In that regard, this paper aims to fill the present gap and means to uncover the opinions of students undergoing extensive listening activities through the use of online podcasts/TED Talks. Generally speaking, podcasts can be broadly defined as digital audio files that can be utilised as pedagogical tools (Kukulska-Hulme & Shield, 2008). From this, it can be inferred that podcasts can serve as an educational resource, specifically as a means of nurturing listening skills (and in this context, as a resource for extensive listening). According to Indahsari (2020), podcasts, as learning materials, can be divided into two categories. The first is authentic content from native speakers which is originally not intended for learning. However, in extensive learning, since students are encouraged to find various resources to nurture their listening comprehension, authentic contents from native speakers are highly encouraged. On top of that, using materials with real native speakers, like podcasts, is not considered to be a teaching strategy, but it does offer a real linguistic environment with real native speakers who are proficient in their original tongue. The second type of podcast is a podcast that is specifically designed for learning. For this podcast category, the materials are centred on how to fulfil the students’ knowledge. Podcasts as learning materials are a good choice, since in terms of accessibility, podcasts are widely available online on varying platforms and service providers such as YouTube, ITunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Podcasts are widely used in today’s day and age as a means of communication and information, and by listening to them, one can easily discover the information that he/she is looking for (Insani, 2021). Aside from the accessibility, podcasts in learning offer flexibility. Time, place, and pacing have been described by the podcasting literature as the aspects where this flexibility can be realised (Salmon and Nie, 2008). In other words, assuming students own personal mobile devices like mobile phones and personal media players, learners can access the podcasts wherever they are. The easy access offered by podcasts to scaffold students’ learning can also be one of the learning aspects so that extensive listening can be more enjoyable for the students. Alm (2013) investigated the use of podcasts for EL practice using the metacognitive framework Muhammad Handi Gunawan, Indra Cipta Putra Mandiri, Didi Suherdi, Eisha Sabila Dieni Hanifa, & Aninda Putri Gunawan Exploring EFL students’ perceptions of the use of podcasts/TED Talks in extensive listening class 46 developed by Vandergrift and Goh (2012). 28 intermediate German students participated in Alm's study, listening to self-selected podcasts over the course of one semester. Study findings demonstrate that the blogging activity scaffolded language learners to sustain a variety of EL practices by drawing on data from focus group interviews, surveys, podcast reviews, and personal blogs (which track students' podcast use). Individual listening goals and personal EL practices may be matched accordingly with the materials chosen by the participants, who in turn felt empowered to make their own choices. Their listening skills were therefore improved by the autonomy of the listening activity. METHOD This paper intends to conduct a qualitative analysis of EFL students’ perspectives on the use of podcasts/TED Talks as resources for their extensive listening activities, under the demography of Indonesian EFL students. In order to do so, this study enlists first-semester English Education department students of a public state university located in Indonesia, under the class of Listening for General Communication 1 as its participants. The main data is sourced from a reflection questionnaire, distributed post-course. This reflective questionnaire is centred around the students’ experiences throughout the course. Although the reflective questionnaire is by nature a means of unveiling the students’ experiences, questions that inquire about their perspective and opinion towards the usage of podcasts and TED Talks as extensive listening materials were present. With this in mind, only the questions under the context of inquiring about the students’ perspectives on using podcasts/TED Talks as extensive listening material are taken into account as the data for this study. Specifically, the question that is the focus of this study is “What is your opinion on the use of Podcasts/TED Talks in learning English?” These questions are further divided into two sub-categories, each for the students’ opinion on the use of Podcasts/TED Talks in learning English inside and outside of the classroom, respectively. The usage of this reflective questionnaire is similar to the previous research by Alm (2013), which investigates the use of podcasts for out-of-class listening practice. However, to differentiate this study from its predecessors– and to expand on it, this study would also investigate the use of podcasts/TED Talks as a material for use inside of the classroom. It should also be noted that the questionnaire distributed is in Bahasa Indonesia, and as a result, all transcripts from the questionnaire will be translated into English, were they chosen to be included as examples in this paper. As previously mentioned, this study enlists first-semester English Education department students of a public state university located in Indonesia, under the class of Listening for General Communication 1 as its participants, all 23 students of the selected class are participating in the study. These 23 students consist of 7 male and 16 female students. In addition to that, 5 out of the 23 participants are picked for an additional interview session. This interview session was undergone as a means of clarification and to provide additional insights in regard to the aforementioned question. The five students were picked as their responses are deemed rather unclear, hence needing further elaboration and clarification on certain points. The interview sessions enlisted a semi-structured style of interview, where a set of predetermined questions were prepared in advance, but the possibility of formulating more questions should it be deemed necessary remains open. As with the nature of the questionnaires mentioned previously, the interview also uses Bahasa Indonesia, and therefore the original text and excerpts that will be provided in the article will be translated into the English version. The time allotted to each individual interview with each participant is roughly 30 minutes, and the questions that the interview is centred around are: (1) What is your opinion on the use of Podcasts/TED Talks in learning English inside the classroom? And (2) What is your opinion on the use of Podcasts/TED Talks in learning English outside of the classroom? It is worth noting that in the aforementioned class and course, the practice of both intensive and extensive listening is combined. This is because, in the Department of English Education at the aforementioned university, there are no standalone classes that focus solely on extensive listening. Listening courses in the department rely heavily on the implementation of intensive listening, where the learning materials used in the course are by nature, predetermined. With that in mind, the extensive listening part comes in the form of a weekly assignment where the students are assigned to listen to various extensive listening materials such as podcasts and Ted Talks. In addition to undergoing said extensive listening activity, the students were also required to record their extensive listening activities through the use of listening journals, adapted from Takaesu (2013). After writing down their extensive listening Indonesian EFL Journal (IEFLJ) p-ISSN 2252-7427, e-ISSN 2541-3635 Volume 9, Issue 1, January 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/IEFLJ/index 47 activity in their weekly listening journals, they would then be given time to discuss their weekly extensive listening journals with their classmates, and this is done after they are finished with the intensive listening part of the class. The time allotted for each extensive listening journal discussion session in the class is roughly 40 minutes. It can be inferred from the preceding elaborations that this study is heavily centred around the usage of online resources. This was done as the study was conducted during the situation when the COVID-19 pandemic is ravaging the world. The reflective questionnaires (which serve as the main data to be analysed in the study) are gathered in a google drive folder, specific to the class in question. The weekly listening journals are also kept on track through the use of google sites, where each individual student/participant of the study is free to customise the structure and layout of their respective google sites. In addition to that, the semi-structured interviews that are undertaken by the aforementioned five participants are carried out through the use of the Zoom application. This was, of course, done in conjunction with the university’s policy of ERT (emergency remote teaching), which means that the utilisation of social media and online resources as an alternative method of conducting the teaching and learning process under these circumstances (Kusuma, 2022). The analysis of the data involves a practice of coding similar to the one used in a study by Widodo & Rozak (2016), as a means of unveiling/generating codes alongside the emergent themes found throughout the data. This coding categorised all the data of the study into theme- specific codes or patterns from which the data were extracted. As an example of the practice, the following data: “The use of podcasts in the English learning process provides an interesting alternative learning method” were grouped into a theme called “Podcasts are an interesting tool to be used inside a listening classroom”. This was decided due to the presence of the lexical wording of “an interesting alternative learning method.” The identification and analysis of the lexical wording is the strategy used in the analysis to identify emergent themes throughout the data of the study. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION An analysis of the gathered data from the distributed questionnaire revealed that the use of podcasts as a tool for extensive listening is viewed by students in a largely positive manner. Participants argued that the use of podcasts increases their engagement in class, trains their ability in listening to native speech, and provides a new method of undergoing a listening class. Recurring themes found in the students’ responses will be further elaborated below, followed by their sample excerpts. The results will mainly be divided into two sections, with one focusing on the general overview of the use of podcasts/TED Talks inside the classroom, and the other focusing on the use of podcasts/TED Talks outside of the classroom. Considerations to be taken into account are: (1) The use of podcasts/TED Talks in the classroom is through the use of the zoom meeting platform, and (2) Technical difficulties under the context of network and/or signal problems will be discussed separately from the outlooks of the activities under either context, as the focus of this study is to uncover the opinions of students undergoing extensive listening activities. Furthermore, recurring themes in students’ opinions on the use of podcasts/TED Talks both inside and outside of the classroom will also be mentioned. The use of podcasts/TED Talks inside the classroom The use of podcasts/TED Talks inside the classroom receives a largely positive opinion from the students, with twenty out of the twenty-three students (approximately 87% of the study’s participants) finding its usage inside the classroom to overall provide them with a positive experience. Common themes that are found in the participants’ positive responses are: (1) Podcasts/TED Talks are an interesting tool to be used inside a listening classroom, (2) Listening to podcasts/TED Talks improves their listening, and (3) It increases the lesson and assignment’s efficiency. Excerpts from the questionnaire as samples for the aforementioned themes are provided below: Podcasts/TED Talks are an interesting tool to be used inside a listening classroom “The use of podcasts/TED Talks in the English learning process provides an interesting alternative learning method because after listening to the discussion in a podcast we can express our understanding directly.” “Of course, podcasts/TED Talks for learning English make things interesting. In classroom learning, students can exchange opinions about topics that have been listened to through podcasts.” Muhammad Handi Gunawan, Indra Cipta Putra Mandiri, Didi Suherdi, Eisha Sabila Dieni Hanifa, & Aninda Putri Gunawan Exploring EFL students’ perceptions of the use of podcasts/TED Talks in extensive listening class 48 “I think it's very helpful because the topics discussed in a podcast/TED Talks are always informative, insightful, and are interesting to be discussed in class.” From the voices of students mentioned above, it can be summarised that students perceived that the use of podcasts in extensive listening classrooms provide an interesting alternative learning method as it offers a sense of freedom for students through the learning activity, starting from freedom to express themselves and their whole understanding directly towards certain topics they are discussing which are informative and insightful until exchange their reactions of the topics by giving opinions one by one. These points of view are in line with some studies, which concluded that podcasts trigger students’ interests (Davydenko, 2021; Harahap, 2020; and Rachmaniputri et al., 2021), as well as enhance their motivation in listening activities due to its various and interesting topics (Suzani, 2020; Yoestara & Putri, 2019). Listening to podcasts improves their listening “It can improve listening comprehension, especially for the IELTS and TOEFL tests because podcasts/TED Talks make us used to listening to native speakers speak so they don't feel nervous during the test.” “I am comfortable using podcasts/TED Talks because they are effective and can have a significant positive impact on improving listening skills.” “I think using podcasts/TED Talks in the classroom is a great way of learning, also being able to make us good listeners (no matter what accent is used).” According to the findings, podcasts/TED Talks have a major effect on students' listening comprehension. The positive responses from students have demonstrated the effectiveness of podcasts as a medium for improving students' listening comprehension. This fact clearly indicates that extensive listening to English podcasts has a significant impact on students' listening comprehension. This finding backs up previous research that found that students who received instruction via podcast achieved higher levels of listening comprehension than those who were not. (Fardavoodi & Bakhtiarvand, 2020; Widodo & Gunawan, 2019). Since listening in EFL/ESL context was viewed as ‘passive’ skills to acknowledge and the materials for teaching listening skills seemed to be neglected in language teaching (Renandya & Widodo, 2016; Robert & Meenakshi, 2022), this technology can be an alternative media to develop students’ fluency in listening, introduce how to pronounce words, and enrich students’ vocabularies. This is also previously stated by Jyoti (2020), listening is a complex, active process in which the listener must discriminate between sounds and understand vocabulary and grammatical structures. By incorporating podcasts/TED Talks in teaching listening, students develop their proficiency in listening and English as general. Therefore, podcasts can be used as main sources or supplementary tools as suggested by previous research (Abdulrahman et al., 2018; Ghoorchaei et al., 2021; Indasari, 2020). Podcasts enhance the efficiency of lessons and assignments “Listening to podcasts/TED Talks according to the given course materials increases efficiency in terms of assignments and allows for the creativity of students.” “For learning in the classroom, using podcasts/TED Talks increases the efficiency in terms of assignments being given.” “Using podcasts/TED Talks in the classroom is very effective. In addition to training the focus in one-way communications, podcasts/TED Talks have great potential to be a learning tool.” From the answers above, students acknowledged podcasts as learning media which helped them to enhance the efficiency of lessons and assignments in their listening classroom. This finding indicates that podcasting can be an effective study tool which facilitates the completion and evaluation of assignments in foreign language classes (Abdous et al., 2009; Panagiotidis, 2021). Then, relating students’ perception with their experiences in using podcasts/TED Talks, most of them agreed that podcasts are perfect and potential tools due to their effectiveness in training the students’ focus in one- way communications. Using podcasts as a medium for learning opens up new opportunities in the language learning context: a research from Najmi and Navaee-Lavasani (2021) showed that audio content facilitates memory retention three times as effectively as a text. The auditory dimension of podcasting, e.g., intonation or vocal expression, conveys a message directly to the listener’s heart and brain (Clevenger & Rick, 2021). Same goes Indonesian EFL Journal (IEFLJ) p-ISSN 2252-7427, e-ISSN 2541-3635 Volume 9, Issue 1, January 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/IEFLJ/index 49 with the personal touch, including expression of emotions, a previous study from Yuan et al. (2022) argued that feelings and tonal variations may contribute to a podcast message, in a way that cannot be achieved with a textual message. It should be noted that three students (approximately 13% of participants of the study) opted to have opinions where they see the use of podcasts/TED Talks inside the classroom as something not entirely positive. Excerpts from the three are provided below: “In my opinion, instead of using podcasts/TED Talks, in class (online) it is more effective to hear conversations between lecturers and my friends. “I think it takes too much time because what I know about (raw) podcasts/TED Talks is that they are very long in duration.” “There are times when using podcasts/TED Talks in class becomes a challenge because the topics or podcasts used are not in accordance with the abilities of some students.” From what students’ have already mentioned above, the implementation of podcasts in listening classrooms makes them face several challenges as follows: 1) the effectiveness of podcasts if it is used both in offline or online classrooms compared to the real conversations between students and teachers; 2) the long duration of common podcasts; and 3) some of the topics of podcasts are not in accordance with students’ abilities. Referring to one study conducted by Hudson (2020), generally in today’s era, technology that is “always on, always on you” continually disrupts and prevents us from engaging with real people as real people. Therefore, it is no wonder there will always be students who feel that podcasts are not as effective as real conversations if it is implied in real-life situations due to the limits of certain technologies. Additionally, the variety of topics and length is based on the sources where the students find the audio files. A previous research about the impact of podcast length by Şendağ et al. (2018) argued that students tend to get bored easily while listening to podcasts with repetitive topics and long audio duration, which usually takes too much time only to successfully grasp the whole conversation or speech. Moreover, the limited ability of some students to be familiar enough with any topics while listening to podcasts also becomes a serious issue. They tend to struggle in encountering this barrier to get along with the lessons as it has already been stated before. The use of podcasts/TED Talks outside of the classroom The use of podcasts/TED Talks outside of the classroom receives an overwhelmingly positive opinion from the students, with twenty-two of the twenty-three students (approximately 96% of the study’s participants) finding its usage outside of the classroom to overall provide them with a positive experience. Common themes that are found in the participants’ positive responses are: (1) Podcasts/TED Talks provide freedom of topics, (2) Listening to podcasts/TED Talks provides flexibility in honing their listening, and (3) Listening to podcasts/TED Talks provides motivation. Excerpts from the questionnaire as samples for the aforementioned themes are provided below: Podcasts/ TED Talks provide freedom of topics “For learning outside the classroom, students can explore podcast/TED Talks topics according to their respective interests to broaden their horizons.” (Respondent 5) “I really enjoy the process of doing Extensive Listening assignments because I can choose the content that I like.” (Respondent 13) “Because the topics discussed in podcasts/TED Talks are very diverse, I can choose the topics I want to hear without being tied to the material in the book or what is being discussed in class.” (Respondent 17) As previously mentioned by students, all of them agreed that podcasts/TED Talks help them in promoting student-centred learning since podcasts are varied based on their diversity of topics, which is able to make students build up the excitement and motivation in the learning process. A broad amount of content offered while listening to podcasts/TED Talks obviously can become a starting point for students to enjoy every step and process they are going to take without any limitations to express themselves. Podcasts/TED Talks provide flexibility in honing their listening “The use of podcasts/TED Talks outside the classroom, such as in Extensive Listening assignments, will make students more flexible to explore comfortably and indirectly give students time to assemble their understanding.” (Respondent 2) Muhammad Handi Gunawan, Indra Cipta Putra Mandiri, Didi Suherdi, Eisha Sabila Dieni Hanifa, & Aninda Putri Gunawan Exploring EFL students’ perceptions of the use of podcasts/TED Talks in extensive listening class 50 “It can be done at any time, place and situation. With a longer and more flexible time, it is more effective to improve listening skills in English.” (Respondent 15) “It is fun. Because I can listen to it anytime and it can be replayed until I understand.” (Respondent 23) From the findings, it is concluded that podcasts/TED Talks provide a sense of freedom for students as they feel the flexibility by using podcasts as their learning medium. Podcasts can be accessed at any time, place, and situation which is effective for students not to feel the burdens of learning. Podcasts/TED Talks provide motivation “Sometimes we don't have enough time or motivation to sit still and read. Podcasts/TED Talks can be a great substitute.” (Respondent 6) “Podcasts/TED Talks can motivate us to be more observant in the words/vocabulary used in it.” (Respondent 19) This study found that students in listening classrooms have high motivation to study English by using podcasts/TED Talks due to the features provided by podcasts such as various listening classroom activities. Specifically, podcasts/TED Talks offer students the opportunity to enthusiastically observe and respond to teachers so the levels of their learning speed up desirably. Some exercises and assignments of podcasts on English words and vocabularies motivates students to use their observative skill as well as to sharpen their listening skill. This finding is in line with Abdulrahman et al.’s (2018) study that podcasts can be a way to help and motivate students in listening comprehension in which students use their imagination and build pictures of who and what they are listening to in their head. To summarise, the opinions on the use of podcasts/TED Talks inside the classroom are overwhelmingly positive, racking up twenty-two positive opinions (accounting for 96% of the students involved in the study). A student, however, respondent 9 (accounting for approximately 4% of the students involved in the study), shared a different opinion, noting that the usage of the podcasts outside of the classroom limits the practitioner to their own understanding and point of view, as opposed to the possibility of discussing them with peers under the context of podcast usage inside of the classroom. Technical difficulties encountered in the activity Several technical difficulties were encountered throughout the extensive listening activities. These hurdles are present due to the inherent nature of the activity and resource of being online podcasts, which means they are dependent on the practitioner’s signal strength, and the potency of their network connection. Excerpts that voices complaints in regard to these difficulties are as follows: “...when learning is carried out online as it is today, there are often obstacles such as internet connection so that what I hear is not clearly heard.” (Respondent 1) “I personally feel I'm nervous because of the condition of the internet network, so it's a bit awkward to answer.” (Respondent 13) “...sometimes the internet connection is simply insufficient.” (Respondent 15) To summarise, the technical difficulties encountered in the extensive listening activities fall into the narrow category of network-related problems, as evident from the sample excerpts provided above. This is to be expected, due to the nature of the activities, being heavily reliant on the internet connection of an individual partaking in it. CONCLUSION In conclusion to the aforementioned findings and discussion, it can be inferred that the use of podcasts/TED Talks both inside and outside of the classroom is received overwhelmingly positively by the students. This is made evident by the findings that indicated that 87% of the students found its usage inside the classroom to be positive, citing that the usage of said media is interesting, that it improves their listening skills, and that it enhances the effectiveness of the lessons being conducted. As for the usage outside of the classroom, 96% of the participants found its usage to be positive, citing that it provides them with a broad range of topics they could choose from, that it provides flexibility in learning, and that it provides them with motivation. Minor hiccups were found, however, presenting themselves in the form of occurring technical difficulties. The results of this study may be applied as considerations to be taken into account by educators who would like to enlist the use of Indonesian EFL Journal (IEFLJ) p-ISSN 2252-7427, e-ISSN 2541-3635 Volume 9, Issue 1, January 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/IEFLJ/index 51 podcasts inside and outside of the class as learning material. In other words, the findings may serve as an insight into the opinions of the students who use podcasts in their listening activities. As a recommendation for a follow-up or continuation of the study, it is possible that further study in regards to what would be the preferred source of podcasts used by students to be conducted, in order to complement the findings discovered in this study and to add another point of consideration for the aforementioned educators. REFERENCES Abdous, M., Camarena, M., & Facer, B. (2009). MALL technology: Use of academic podcasting in the foreign language classroom. ReCALL, 21(1), 76- 95. 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