| dc.description.abstract | Listening is a daily need. In everyday life, people listen to the news; listen to
other people talking, listen to announcements, and also listen to songs. It means that
almost every day people listen to something in order to get some information which
they want to. Without having a good listening ability, it is difficult for people to
comprehend the spoken language and there will be a gap in communication.
Therefore, surely listening has an important role in our life.
As one of the ways to communicate, listening is realized as a problematic
skill in which all the processes happen in the mind. It needs understanding of a
speakers’ pronunciation, his grammar, and his vocabulary to identify and understand
what others are saying. However, comprehending a spoken language can be done
through two kinds of processes namely Top-Down process and Bottom-Up process.
These can be used to help the listeners in gaining the general and the specific
information of the spoken language. Besides, an appropriate material for listening
activity is also needed to help the students in comprehending a spoken language
easily.
In listening class, the English teacher may use a certain instructional material
which can help to arouse and catch the students’ interest in learning listening. If the
students’ interest and willingness increase, they will enjoy the learning activity
process and improve their listening comprehension achievement. In this case, songs
were chosen to help the students improve their participation and their listening
comprehension achievement because songs present enjoyment that can be highly
motivating students to learn English even the poor ones. The kind of songs used in
this research was English pop songs because it is familiar to listen.
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The design of this research was Classroom Action Research. It was intended
to improve the students’ participation and the listening comprehension achievement
by using English pop songs. This research subjects were the students of IX-C class at
SMP Negeri 2 Tanggul in the 2014/2015 academic year. This research had been done
in two cycles. Each cycle was conducted in three meetings including listening test.
There were four stages of activities in each cycle, namely planning the action;
implementing the action; observing and evaluating; and analyzing the data and doing
reflection. The listening test was done to get the primary data, while observation was
done to get the supporting data.
Based on the result of listening comprehension test, it was found out that the
percentage of the students who passed the target criteria in Cycle 1 was 51.42% or 18
of 35 students. It means that the students’ listening comprehension achievement score
did not meet the success criteria yet that was 70% students should get score at least
75. Therefore, the action was continued to Cycle 2. The result of listening
comprehension test in Cycle 2 showed that there were 25 of 33 students (75.75%)
who got scores 75 or higher. In other words, their listening comprehension score
increased from 51.42% in Cycle 1 to 75.75% in Cycle 2. The percentage
improvement proved that the use of English pop songs as the instructional material
could help the students improve their listening comprehension achievement.
Furthermore, based on the results of the observation in Cycle 1 and Cycle 2,
it was found out that the average percentage result of students’ participation in Cycle
1 was 60.56%. It had not achieved the success criteria of students’ participation in
this research that was 75%. Because of that, the observation was continued to Cycle
2. Cycle 2 showed that the average percentage result of students’ participation was
79.68%. It can be concluded that the use of English pop songs could improve the
students’ participation in listening class. Thus, it is suggested for English teacher to
use English pop songs as the alternative material in teaching listening activity in
order to help improve his/her students’ participation as well as their listening
comprehension achievement. | en_US |
