Improving Students’ Listening Skills by Using Audio Visual

Abstract

Listening is among the various abilities that is necessary for learning English. Listening is crucial to language learning because the more we hear the language, the faster we learn it. However, listening is not as easy as it seems especially for EFL students. Alternative media plays an important role to assist students more interested and enthusiastic about learning a language. This study aimed to investigate 1) the students’ listening skills taught by using audio 2) the students’ listening skills taught by using audio visual 3) to figure out to discover the significant disparity in students' listening abilities taught by using audio and those taught by using audio visual. This is an experimental study that employed a quasi-experimental research design having two classes: control and experimental class.The sample of this study was 8th grades students at SMPN 34 Semarang with a total amount of 68 students. Each class consisted of 34 students. The writer used audiovisuals in the form of short animation videos. To collect data, 20 questions were provided. SPSS 24 was used to do statistical analysis on the acquired data. The results indicated that 1) the students’ listening skills taught by using audio were classified as good with a score of 70.9 2) the students’ listening skills taught by using audio visual were classified as excellent with a score of 82.9 3) There was a substantial difference in the listening abilities of learners taught using audio and those taught using audio visual. N-Gain test also showed a mean score of 64 with an effective enough category. This recognized that audiovisual is effective in improving students’ listening skills. Seeing these results, audiovisuals can be considered to be used as an innovative way of language teaching, especially listening.