The Effect of Using Podcast on Students’ Listening Comprehension Achievement

Abstract

Listening is one of the important English skills that students find challenging to learn. A good listening ability is needed for EFL students to understand the conversation or important information in academic even daily activities. The unavailable facilities, materials lacking, and students’ low interest in practice listening also became factors why their achievement in listening was low. The existence of podcasts has been identified as an interesting material for the teaching and learning process of listening and learning to help enhance student achievement. This research is conducted to determine whether podcast significantly affect listening comprehension achievement of junior high school students. By using a quasi-experimental study with a post-test-only design, this study administered a test to second-grade junior high school students and analyzed the data using an independent t-test in the Special Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) 25. It involved eighth-grade students in the academic year 2025/2026. The researcher performed a homogeneity test to determine the sample, which found to be homogeneous after it was evaluated using SPSS 25. Therefore, the researcher did a lottery, which resulted in VIII A as the control group while VIII B was the experimental group. Throughout the study, the researcher administered the treatment in four meetings. The experimental group was taught listening using podcast, whereas the control group was taught using a conventional teaching method. To complete the treatment, the researcher conducted a post-test to find the significant difference between the students’ achievement in the experimental group and the control group. The result of an independent t-test on SPSS 25 revealed Sig. (2-Tailed) was 0.004 < 0.05, indicating a significant difference in the achievement of the experimental and control groups. Hence, it can be concluded that using podcast for listening has a positive outcome for students’ listening comprehension achievement. This study revealed that podcast has a positive effect on listening comprehension achievement of second-grade junior high school students. The mean score of the post-test from the experimental group was found higher than the control group, it was 59.00 to 49.19. It means podcast truly affect the listening achievement of second-grade junior high school students. Since podcast has a positive impact on students’ listening comprehension achievement, English teachers are suggested to implement podcast in teaching listening to improve students’ achievement and create an enjoyable learning experience in the classroom. Future researchers are advised to conduct a study with a bigger sample and various topics. It is also recommended to investigate the effect of podcast on other English skills.