IMPROVING THE GRADE IX-C STUDENTS’ PARTICIPATION AND THEIR LISTENING COMPREHENSION ACHIEVEMENT BY USING ENGLISH POP SONGS AT SMP NEGERI 2 TANGGUL

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. xiii

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.