The Effect of Using Slow Beat English Songs on the Eight Year Students’ Listening Comprehension Achievement at SMPN 3 Jember in The 2011/2012 Academic Year

Abstract

Listening is one of the language skills that should be mastered by the students in Junior High School. Unfortunately, EFL students still have difficulties in listening comprehension. Further, it makes difficult for them to gain better score for other language skills and components. When a teacher gives listening test to the students, they still make some mistakes mostly in catching what the speaker says. It is caused by unfamiliar English words they have. One solution to solve this problem is using interesting media appropriate for students named slow beat English songs. Supporting this solution, Davies

Further, an experimental research on listening skill by using songs had been done by Saputri Based on the interview with the English teacher at SMPN 3 Jember it was known that she rarely gave listening practice to the students. Although the school had already had good facilities as it is an RSBI school, but still she rarely used it. It was because she thought that bring them to multimedia room was wasting time. However, when she teaches listening, she speaks orally to the students. So the English teacher had never used slow beat English songs in teaching listening. xiii The English teacher should apply the appropriate and interesting materials for listening practices to help the students get the messages or the information from the text. Therefore, applying slow beat English songs can be used to help the students to comprehend the listening comprehension since songs can make students feel comfortable with the materials. This research was an experimental research. The purpose of this research was to know whether or not the use of Slow Beat English Songs has a significant effect on the eighth grade students’ listening comprehension achievement at SMPN 3 Jember in the 2011/2012 Academic Year. The area of this research was SMP Negeri 3 Jember. It was chosen purposively because the use of Slow Beat English Songs had never been applied in teaching learning process in this school. The respondents of this research were the eighth grade students of SMPN 3 Jember in the 2011/2012academic year. The research respondents were determined by cluster random sampling through homogeneity analysis of teacher’s score. The total number of the respondents was 57 students that consisted of 29 students of VIII D as the experimental group taught by using Slow Beat English Songs, while the control group consisted of 28 students of VIII B taught by using researcher’s voice recording. The data of this research were collected from the students’ scores of listening comprehension test, interview and documentation. The listening comprehension test was taken from the post test to make comparison between the two groups after the treatment, and the result was analyzed by using t-test formula in SPSS ver 11.5. Based on the calculation, the mean score of the experimental group was higher than that of the mean score of the control group ( Based on the computation of the result of the post test’s score, the value of the t-test was 6.551, while the degree of freedom was 55. It was consulted with the 5% table of significant level and the critical value of t-test was 1.67. The value of the t-test was higher than the critical value of t-test

contrast, the alternative hypothesis