The Effectiveness of Georgia Na'S Podcast On Spotify To Improve Students' Listening Skills
The Effectiveness of Georgia Na'S Podcast On Spotify To Improve Students' Listening Skills
The Effectiveness of Georgia Na'S Podcast On Spotify To Improve Students' Listening Skills
IN MULTICULTURAL CONTEXTS
(TLEMC)
http://jurnal.unsil.ac.id/index.php/tlemc/index
E-ISSN : 2541-6383
December 2021, Vol. 5 No. 2
ABSTRACT
This research reported the issues of using Georgina’s podcast on Spotify to improve
student’s listening skills. This research aimed at figure out the improvement of the students’
listening ability in listening skills by using the Spotify application as a tool that focused on
listening to Georgina’s podcast in subject asking and giving directions. In doing so, the
subjects consisted of 20 students who were in tenth grade. The researcher applied a mixed
methods design, which type is the embedded design. The instruments were a test and a
questionnaire. The sample was taken by using a random sampling technique. The results
of the test and the related comparisons, findings showed that Georgina’s podcast on
Spotify is effective to improve students’ listening skills. This can be seen from the mean
results of the pre-test was 30.00 and the post-test was 86.67 with the t-test value
orientation is greater than the t-table (12.391>2.110). As a result of this fact, the post-test
score in the class was significantly different after going under the treatment. To sum up,
Georgina’s podcast on Spotify is an effective medium to improve students’ listening skills in
subject asking and giving directions. However, the success of podcasting depends on the
teacher's ability to use Spotify and the selection of appropriate material in a way that
guides students to achieve their learning goals.
INTRODUCTION
EFL students need to learn all of the basic language skills such as speaking, listening,
reading and writing, in order to acquire a foreign language as well as the first language.
There is a research from Pourhosein and Seyedeh (2011, p. 784) which explores, beside the
four main areas of language skills, listening is the most important of all and it has an
important role in the communication process. According to Latif (2017, p. 32), Listening is
the crucial skill for the Students because it is one of the basic capabilities that can be used to
support other English skills such as speaking and reading. In the other word, listening is one
of the toughest skills among the four language skills in English such as listening, speaking,
reading and writing and the most challenging skills as well.
In the process of English teaching, researchers also found some problems. For
example, the textbooks often used by school teachers are not completed through audio files,
and teachers still use traditional tools such as speakers in listening teaching. According to
Handayani (2016, p. 323), media is a tool that used as a medium to increase the
effectiveness and efficiency in order to get the purpose in learning. A key problem with the
traditional tools often used by teachers is that students only listen in class because students
are not interested in recording and taking home to repeat. In this case, we need a portable
listening tool that can be easily used by users anytime, anywhere. Researchers call this tool
a podcast. According to Howell and Lee (2007, p. 226), one of the teaching resources
available for mobiles is audio-based learning (MP3 players and podcasting).
*Corresponding Author
Leni Irianti
Email: bulen.lenie@gmail.com
The Effectiveness of Georgiana’s Podcast on Spotify to Improve Students’ 157
Listening Skills
Podcasts are usually in the form of audio or video files, and they have significant role
to improve learners listening skills. Podcasting has huge potential in improving learners’
listening and speaking skills (SZE, 2006, p. 121). In the field of language teaching, listening
applications are becoming increasingly popular, and 'podcasts' are especially attractive to
language learners, and one of the listening applications is Spotify. Spotify is one of digital
music, podcast, and video streaming service that gives the listener access to millions of
songs and other content from artists all over the world. How people listen to podcast
changes when premium music, podcast, video-streaming based application like Spotify
rises. It does not need massive smartphone memory to store the podcasts, since the songs
play directly from the internet cloud storage that makes the number of the songs simply
unlimited.
In this study, there are several problems that can be identified. First, language
classroom basically needs teaching media that support the English teaching and learning.
Second, students especially adolescents want to learn listening by doing interesting
activities. The last, is a language teaching method, the teacher always uses the traditional
method. Furthermore, there are some previous studies related to this study. Those are: The
Impact of Using Podcast on Iranian Autonomous / Non Autonomous EFL Learners’ Listening
Comprehension Ability at Pre-Intermediate Level by Sayadi & Heidar (2018, pp. 72-82), The
Use of Audio Podcast for Teaching Listening Comprehension by Alfian, Lio, & Marafat
(2019, pp. 1-11), Utilizing Podcast in Listening Class: The Advantages and The Challenges
by Romadhon (2019, pp. 1-11), The Effectiveness of Multimedia Application on Student
Listening Comprehension by Pangaribuan, Sinaga, & Sipayung (2017, pp. 212-218), The
Impact of Podcast on EFL Students’ Listening Comprehension by Abdulrahman, Basalama,
& Widodo (2018, pp. 23-33).
According to the previous studies, few researchers discuss about multimedia
application or podcast, and they don’t use a podcast on Spotify. Here the researcher has
compared. The differences or gap contained here are using Georgina’s podcast on Spotify in
learning asking and giving directions. Thus, the present study has two research questions,
first “is there any significant difference in students’ listening skills before and after being
taught by means of Georgiana’s podcast on spotify?” second, “how students’ respond to the
use of Georgiana’s podcasts on Spotify to improve their listening skills?”
METHODS
Researcher designed to use mixed methods design, which type is the embedded
design. It is useful when a researcher needs to embed a quantitative design within a
qualitative component, as in the case of an experimental or correlation design. According to
Creswell (2014, p. 269) in this study, the researcher will collect both quantitative and
qualitative data, analyze them separately, and then compare the results to see if the findings
confirm or disconfirm each other. Fraenkel and Wallen (2014, p. 265) argue that mixed
methods do not discuss mixing or combining the two forms of data in a study, but the
assumption that the two forms of data provide different types of information. It means that
different question requires different types of data. Different questions to be answered
because a single data set in not sufficient.
Researcher carried out pre-experimental design to collect quantitative data. Therefore
researchers will study one group and provide interventions during the experiment (Cresswel,
2014, p. 219). In this case, the researcher chosen a one-group pretest-posttest design, while
for qualitative data design, the researcher was carried out descriptive qualitative research.
Descriptive is the characteristic of data in qualitative study because it is taken from
documents, audio-video recordings, transcripts, words, & pictures (Walliman, 2001, p.259).
Quantitative method used to obtain data from the experimental results, while qualitative
method used to understand the relationship between the results obtained by students after
treatment. The scores obtained by students after the post-test compared with the results of
qualitative data collection.
158 Widya Salsabila, Leni Irianti, Luthfiyatun Thoyyibah
The researcher conducted at one private vocational school at Kawali. The reason the
researchers chose this location was because of the problems faced by the teachers at the
school are the students' listening ability level in learning English was still quite low and
student learning outcomes did not reach the minimum completeness criteria (KKM), so the
researcher was interested in conducting research. According to Taylor (2016, p. 32), the
ideal research is one in which the observer obtains easy access, establishes immediate
rapport with informants, and gather data directly related to the research interest.
To collect the data, the researcher used of some procedures: Before giving the
treatment, the researcher was given a pre-test. It took in 30 minutes. The material test that
the researcher used consisted of 10 items. The pre-test was used to know the prior
knowledge of the students’ ability in listening through podcast. Then, the researcher gave
treatment by using Spotify Application. The treatment of the research conducted in one
meeting in which the meeting needs 60 minutes. When teaching listening, the researcher
applied three stages of teaching, namely pre-teaching, whilst-teaching and post-teaching or
other terms are now more familiar with the exploration, elaboration and stages confirmation.
This corresponds to what is recommended by Underwood (1990) and Davis et al, (2000) so
that teachers in teaching listening takes three stages teaching, which each has a purpose
and type separate but unified activities in a series of teaching processes. And then Post-test
carried out in the last meeting. The researcher employed post-test to find out the value of
treatment whether the result of post-test better then pre-test or not. Researchers also asked
the time for filling out the questionnaire, this was to collect data through close-ended
questionnaire. Finally, the researcher evaluated the quiz and gave scores to students and
analyzed the data from the questionnaires.
This was done to determine the students' listening skills and their progress. This
instrument is also used to determine the effectiveness of Georgina’s podcasts on Spotify to
improve students listening skills. In this technique the only group to be measure after and
before treatment (Fraenkel, Wallen, & Hyun, 2012, p. 279). Fraenkel, Wallen, & Hyun (2007,
p. 269) suggested a diagram the pre-experimental one group pretest posttest design is as
follows:
O1 X O2
Students’ Teaching by Students’
skill before the
listening Georgina’s
Using listening
Skill after the
treatment podcast on treatment
Spotify
Explanation:
O1 : Pre-test
O2 : Post-test
X : Treatment
The pretest is administered after subjects are randomly assigned to the group to get
an indication of the level of performance of a group before the experiment is conducted.
According to Brill (2018, p, 38) advantage of the pretest-posttest design is that not only can
the researcher determine if there is a different before and after experiment, but also can
determine how much of a change or how much growth there was between the pretest and
the posttest. This type of design is very desirable in education because we usually want to
know how much of a change actually occurred or how much growth occurred between the
pretest and the posttest.
The Effectiveness of Georgiana’s Podcast on Spotify to Improve Students’ 159
Listening Skills
The next data collection technique is a questionnaire. The researcher use adapted
questionnaire from Mistar and Embi, June 2016. This was done to find out students'
perceptions about the use of Georgina’s podcast on Spotify to improve students listening
skill after the treatment. Researcher collected data using a short assessment questionnaire
(Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree). The type of research
questionnaire is a closed question. Closed questions on a Likert scale allow respondents to
choose one of the options such as "agree" or "disagree" given by the researcher without
adding new answers (Dorney, 2007, p. 105). Therefore, the form of closed questions makes
it easier for students to answer them. Finally, the two data was compared to determine the
suitability between student perceptions and the value obtained by students.
The main objective of the research is to know the effectiveness of Georgina’s podcast
in improving students’ listening skills. The primary data collected through pre and post-test
was analyzed by using SPSS 16.0 and the secondary data or students’ perspective about
Georgina’s podcast to improve listening skills collected through questionnaire was explained
using descriptive qualitative. Below is description statistics from the result of one-group pre-
test post-test which calculated by SPSS.
It can be seen from the table 1 that means for the pre-test was shown 30.00 as
compared to the mean for the post-test which was 86.67. The standard deviations obtained
show more variability among the scores of pre-test rather than post-test scores. As a result
of this fact, the post-test score in the class was significantly different after going under the
treatment. Before applying the t-test, the researcher must perform a normality test to find out
whether the data distribution is normally distributed or not.
As in Table 2, the significance value for the pretest in the Kolmogorov column is
0.200 and the result of the significance value for the posttest is 0.020. This means that the
data is normally distributed because the significance value is > 0.05. Therefore,
researchers can calculate the t-test using paired simple t-test.
The researcher elaborated the inferential analysis of the data which are obtained in
the study. It was done using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) 16 version. The
table 4.4 is summarized the inferential analysis of the data of the current study:
160 Widya Salsabila, Leni Irianti, Luthfiyatun Thoyyibah
Paired Differences
95%
Confidence
Interval of the
Difference
Std. Std. Sig.
Mean Devia Error Lower Upper T Df (2-
tion Mean ttailed)
Pair pretest-
1 post -56.667 19.403 4.573 -66.315 -47.018 -12.391 17 .000
test
From the analysis by Paired Samples Test, sig. value 0.000 is lower than 0.05.
Therefore H₁ was accepted and H₀ was rejected. Obviously, there is a significant impact of
the usage of Georgina’s podcast on Spotify in students’ listening skills. Furthermore, the
observed t value was calculated as to be 12.391 (t= 12.391) which is higher than t table (t=
2.110) and the degree of freedom was 17 (df= 17). This score also supported the hypothesis
that students’ listening skills of post-test was influenced by Georgina’s podcast on Spotify.
Results of Questionnaire
No Questions Responds
SA A N D SD
1 Learning to ask and giving direction through Georgina's 17% 77% 6% 0% 0%
podcast on Spotify is fun to improve listening skills.
2 Learning to ask and giving direction through 50% 39% 11% 0% 0%
Georgiana's podcast on Spotify is a positive idea.
3 Spotify is easy to use. 78% 22% 0% 0% 0%
4 Using spotify helps me easily. 22% 61% 17% 0% 0%
5 The interactions on spotify are very clear. 6% 39% 55% 0% 0%
6 Interaction on spotify is easy to understand. 28% 28% 44% 0% 0%
7 It was easy for me to become skilled at searching 17% 50% 33% 0% 0%
podcasts through Spotify.
8 Learning to listening using Spotify is easy for me. 12% 55% 33% 0% 0%
9 Spotify is suitable for academic purposes. 0% 67% 33% 0% 0%
10 Spotify allows me to practice my listening skills 55% 39% 6% 0% 0%
anywhere and anytime.
From the questionnaire, the majority of students find it fun to learn asking and giving
direction through Georgina's podcast to improve listening skills. As much as 89% students
(50% strongly agree and 39% agree) in agreement that Georgina's podcast is a positive idea
for learning asking and giving directions. According to Arono (2014, p. 65), the good learning
media is the media that can deliver the message and can give the understanding for the
Students. Moreover, 78% of students strongly agree that Spotify is easy to use. The
students feel using Spotify helps them easily. This is shown by 61% of students chose to
agree, 22% strongly agree and 17% chose neutral. In terms of interacting with Spotify,
interactions with Spotify are very clear and easy to understand, most students choose to be
neutral. Then, vast majority of the students (50% agree and 17% strongly agree) feel that it
The Effectiveness of Georgiana’s Podcast on Spotify to Improve Students’ 161
Listening Skills
is easy to become skilled at searching for podcasts through Spotify. Most of the students
agreed that Spotify makes it easy for them to learn listening.
Regarding Spotify is suitable for academic purposes, 67 % and 33% of students stay
neutral. Finally, almost all students agree that Spotify helps them practice listening skills
anytime and anywhere. This is shown by 55% of students chose strongly agree and 39%
chose agree. This is in line with Ramos & Blind (2020), Spotify is available across a range of
devices, including computers, phones, tablets, speakers, TV, and cars. You can easily
transition from one to another with Spotify Connect (one of Spotify fitur). It means, Spotify is
easy to use everytime and everywhere cause that application easy to access in every
moments.
This research is one of the effects to generate some improvement in teaching listening
to X.5 OTKP students of vocational high school in Kawali. It has been discussed in the
chapter three that using Georgina’s podcast on Spotify is one of the alternatives to obtain the
intention. The following is the elaborated discussion of the research findings.
Students Listening Skill before and after being taught by means of Georgina’s
podcast on Spotify
The results of the present study support the hypothesis that there was a significant
difference in students’ listening skills before and after being taught by means of Georgiana’s
podcast on Spotify. The posttest scores are higher than pretest scores has proven the
effectiveness of podcast as media to improve students’ listening skills. This fact clearly
proven that the use of Georgina’s podcast in teaching listening gives significant impact to
students’ listening skills. This result is consistent with the previous literature in which
students whose were taught by podcast performed better in listening skill (Alfian, Lio &
Marafat, 2019, para. 9; Sayadi & Heidar, 2018, p. 80; Abdulrahman, Basalamah & Widodo,
2018, p. 30).
In this study, students’ enthusiasm appeared when they pay full attention to answer
teachers’ questions directly and through assignments as Salmon and Edrisingha (2008, p.
44) point out that the sign of successful teaching is to holding students’ attention. Similarly,
students’ enthusiasm was clearly shown by their request and activity since the first meeting.
The situation not only should be interesting but also should make the students keep paying
attention to the following up material. The variation of Georgina’s podcast on Spotify that
combines some aspects such as audio, video, and text adjusted in an attractive simple form
will make the students feel interested, easy, and focus to pay attention on the material
being given. Furthermore, Georgina’s podcast on Spotify could lead to a more natural
ambience, accelerating the learning process. In short, teaching learning process using
Georgina’s podcast on Spotify will make the students feel interested without ignoring the
process itself and it will accelerate the process itself.
162 Widya Salsabila, Leni Irianti, Luthfiyatun Thoyyibah
CONCLUSION
Based on the finding, the data showed that Georgina's podcast on Spotify has
achieved positive results in influencing students' listening skills in subject asking and giving
direction. It could be seen by the students’ mean scores which was increase. It was proven
by the mean score of orientation before and after giving treatment was 30.00 becomes 86.67
improve 56.67. Furthermore, the students generally pleased with the teaching asking and
giving directions by using Georgina’s podcast on Spotify. Almost the students gave their
good responses to the implementation of the podcast. For further researcher, it will be useful
to extend the current findings by implementing podcasts in different fields with diff erent or
the same point of view to find out whether the difference between students' listening skills in
listening habits is significant or not.
Based on the findings and discussions stated in the previous chapter, the researcher
then offered some suggestions related to the result of his research especially for the English
teacher and students. First, both teacher and students must recognize an appropriate
strategy to teach and learn listening. Second, teacher can be able to use Georgina’s podcast
to improve students’ listening skills in subject asking and giving directions by downloading
Spotify. Third, English learners can used Georgina’s podcast in school or their own home to
improve their listening skills. The last but not least, teacher must be able to select the
appropriate podcast to implement in the teaching learning process which based on the
existing syllabus and lesson plan. It is because not all podcast can be applied in teaching
and learning process. It avoids the notion that killing the time through watching video.
This research provided facts that there were implications of podcast for English
language teaching especially theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, Georgina’s
podcast on Spotify gave benefits to both teacher and student. Georgina’s podcast on Spotify
has a great contribution to improve students’ listening skill. Practically, the results of the
research give accurate data that Georgina’s podcast is effective to improve students’
listening skill. For English teacher, Georgina’s podcast can be used as an alternative way to
teach listening skills in subject asking and giving directions which is easier to get.
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