IMPROVING GRADE VIII STUDENTS LISTENING (1)

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IMPROVING GRADE VIII STUDENTS’ LISTENING SKILLS THROUGH DIGITAL
MEDIA
PENINGKATAN KETERAMPILAN MENDENGARKAN SISWA KELAS VIII
MELALUI DIGITAL MEDIA
Laily Amin Fajariyah, Suwarsih Madya
Applied Linguistics Department, Graduate School, UNY
lailyaminf@gmail.com; suwarsihm@gmail.com
Abstract
This study was aimed at improving the listening skills of Grade VIII students of SMPN 5
Panggang, Gunungkidul in the Academic Year of 2013/2014 through digital media. This collaborative
action research study was carried out in three cycles which consisted of: (1) planning, (2) action, (3)
observation, and (4) reflection. The data were gathered through observations, interviews/testimonies,
rating, video/audio recording, and performance tests which were analyzed using the interactive
qualitative data analysis and descriptive statistics. The findings show that the digital media are
believed to improve the listening learning processes which lead into the improvement of students’
listening skills. The results are: (1) pictures in the pre-listening activity is found to increase students’
interest in the lesson, direct their minds into the topic and motivate them to learn; (2) audio media
make students happy and actively involved in the listening instructional process, recognize the
communicative functions of the texts, retain the chunks of language, distinguish among the distinctive

sounds of English, recognize English stress patterns and intonation, recognize words in the given
spoken texts, and comprehend the texts; and (3) the digital stories are able to grab students’ attention,
make them happy, facilitate them to focus on the monologues and comprehend them better.
Key words: listening skills, digital media, pictures, audio media, digital stories, audio-visual media
Abstrak
Penelitian ini ditujukan untuk meningkatkan keterampilan menyimak siswa Kelas VIII di SMPN
5 Panggang, Gunungkidul Pada Tahun Ajaran 2013/2014 melalui media digital. Penelitian tindakan
kolaboratif ini dilaksanakan dalam tiga siklus yang terdiri dari: (1) perencanaan, (2) tindakan, (3)
pengamatan, dan (4) refleksi. Data dalam penelitian ini dikumpulkan melalui pengamatan,
wawancara/testimony, rating, rekaman audio/video, dan tes unjuk kerja. Data tersebut kemudian
dianalisis dengan analisis data kualitatif interaktif dan statistic deskriptif. Temuan penelitian ini
menunjukkan bahwa media digital dipercaya telah meningkatkan proses pembelajaran menyimak yang
menuju pada peningkatan keterampilan menyimak siswa. Hasil dari aktivitas tersebut adalah sebagai
berikut: (1) gambar pada kegiatan pre-listening dapat meningkatkan minat siswa pada pembelajaran,
mengarahkan pikiran mereka pada topik, dan memotivasi mereka untuk belajar; (2) media audio
membuat siswa senang selama pembelajaran dan mereka berperan aktif dalam pembelajaran
menyimak, mengenali fungsi komunikatif teks, menyimpan potongan-potongan bahasa, membedakan
suara yang mirip dalam Bahasa Inggris, mengenali pola tekanan dan intonasi dalam Bahasa Inggris,
mengenali kata dalam teks lisan, dan memahami teks; (3) media digital stories (media audio-visual)
mampu mendapatkan perhatian siswa, membuat mereka senang, memfasilitasi mereka untuk fokus

pada monolog, dan memahaminya dengan lebih baik sehingga mereka dapat mengambil kesimpulan
tentang situasi, partisipan, dan tujuan dari monolog tersebut.
Kata Kunci: keterampilan menyimak, media digital, gambar, media audio, digital stories, dan media
audio-visual

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Introduction
Curriculum 2006 which is officially known
as Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pendidikan
(KTSP) is still implemented at some junior high
schools in the academic year of 2013/2014. One
of the goals of the English Language Teaching
according to this curriculum is to develop the
communicative competences in spoken and
written language to achieve functional literacy
level so the English learning and teaching in
Junior high school is to cover four skills i.e
listening, speaking, reading and writing in the
functional literacy level. Unfortunately, there is

a tendency that the practice of English teaching
at schools is focused on preparing students for
the final Nation-wide examination which covers
only two skills i.e reading and writing. With the
focus of instruction in written skills, spoken
skills are usually overlooked. As a result,
listening and speaking tend to get low portion
in the practice of English teaching.
The similar problem also arose in SMPN 5
Panggang. To my two-year teaching experience
from 2010 to 2012 and validated by my limited
observation in March to April 2013 and the
teacher’s admission, the practice of English
instruction there did not provide balanced
opportunities for students to perform in the
target language through all of the four skills.
There was a skill which was rarely taught
comparing to the other skills. The least taught
skill was listening.
Listening is actually important to be taught

since in real life we need listening for various
purposes such as to get information of
something, e.g. listening to our friends in a
conversation, listening to the radio, watching
TV programme, and accessing youtube or other
sites from internet. Listening also plays
important role in language learning and
acquisition. It provides students with input for
their spoken language (Rost, 2001: p.7;
Richards, 2008: p.3).
In the English classroom setting, the
teaching of listening at Junior High School is
covered in the competence standard no 1 and 2
for the first semester and 7 and 8 for the second
semester. Referring to the standards, listening
activities in every grade are aimed at
comprehending simple transactional and
interpersonal dialogues and short functional
texts and monologues. However, to my limited
observation, the listening activities given to the

students at SMPN 5 Panggang were usually in
the form of listening to songs and dictation in

which the teacher read aloud a text and students
wrote down some words to complete the text
according to what they hear. This activity did
not provide various activities for students.
In fact, there were some techniques to
teach listening. One of the techniques is the
modified
three-stage
listening
which
accommodate the top down and bottom up
processes which resemble the real world
listening (Field, 2008: p.13). The modified three
stages consist of: (1) pre-listening, (2) whilstlistening which includes extensive and intensive
listening, and (3) post-listening (Field, 2008:
pp.17- 21; Richards, 2008: pp.7-10).
In teaching listening, Richards (1983) in

Brown (2007: pp.307-8) proposes the
microskills and macroskills. The microskills
deal with the sentence level and the macroskills
are used at the discourse level. Those skills are
as follows. The micro skills are: retaining
chunks of language of different length in shortterm memory; discriminating among the
distinctive sounds of English; recognizing
English stress patterns, words in stressed and
unstressed positionsm rythmic
structure,
intonational contours, and their role in
signalling information; recognizing reduced
forms of words; distinguishing word
boundaries, recognizing a core of words, and
interpreting; processing of speech at different
rate of delivery; processing speech containing
pauses, errors, corrections, and other
performance
variables;
recognizing

grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.),
systems (e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization),
patterns, rules, and elliptical forms; detecting
sentence constituents and distinguising between
major and minor constituents; and recognizing
that a particular meaning may be expresses in
different grammatical forms.
The macro skills are: recognizing cohesive
devices in spoken discourse; recognizing the
communicative functions of utterances,
according to situations, participants, goals;
inferring situations, participants, goals using
real-world knowledge from evants, ideas, etc.,
described, predicting outcomes, inferring link
and connections between events, deducing
causes and effects, and detecting such relations
as main idea, supporting idea, new information,
given
information,
generalization,

and
exemplification; distinguishing between literal
and implied meanings; using facial, kinesic,
body language and other nonverbal clues to
decipher meanings; and developing and using a

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battery of listening strategies, such as detecting
key words, guessing the meaning of words
from context, appealing for help and signalling
comprehension or lack thereof.
There are also some media which can be
used by teachers in the listening instruction.
Nowadays, technologies have been increasingly
important for human lives nowadays. In all
aspects of lives, both personal and professional
lives make use of technology. Moreover,
today’s children are digital natives who grow
up with technologiy and feel comfortable and

confident with it (Dudeney and Hockly, 2007:
pp.5-9).
The use of technology in the English
instruction nowadays is not limited to the use of
computers. The existence of internet allows
users to integrate the high-technology in the
instruction through e-learning and some other
types of technology-enhanced language
learning. Alberth (2013) suggests that the EFL
teachers can overcome the problems in their
classroom such as lack of comprehensible input
and output, lack of learning resources and
decontextualized teaching and learning by
making effective use of technology. The
decision of the use of the technology should
consider some factors such as student
characteristics, teacher characteristics, the
design of the instruction, the technological
factors such as internet connection and etc.
Those demands of the integration of

technology uses in the instruction have shifted
the role of teachers. Teachers now with the
growth of technology use in the instructions
have play three major roles (Chee and Wong,
2003: pp.34- 41), those are: (1) teachers as
presenters; (2) teachers as facilitators; and (3)
teachers as designers. As the presenter, teachers
present their materials through computer or a
laptop linked to a projection system. While as
facilitators, teachers facilitate the learning
process through helping the students learn. As
designers, teachers need to design their own ITbased materials or media.
Media in the instructional process can be
defined as instructional facilities which carry
messages with instructional purpose i.e
facilitate communication and enhance learning
(Newby et al, 2000: p.100; Chee and Wong,
2003: p.217; Smaldino, et al, 2008: p. 6 ). They
also bridge the gap between theory and practice
(Benson and Odera, 2013: p.12). There are

some basic categories of media, those are: text,
audio, visual, video, manipulatives (objects)

and people (Smaldino, et al, 2008: p.6). In this
era which is also called as digitization era, there
is a major transformation of the use of old data
into digital data. Everything is digitized. In
relatoin to media, the traditional media which
used analog data were translated into digital
data which resulted in digital media.
SMPN 5 Panggang is also well facilitated.
Based on the data gathered in February to
March 2013, this school had 11 PCs for
students, four laptops for teachers and staff,
three LCD projectors and 24 hours internet
connection which had not been optimally used
by the teachers.
From those facilities, abundant of
instructional media are ready to download.
Teachers can also design and develop their own
media by making use of the facilities.
Reflecting on the process of the English
instruction, my collaborator and I agreed to do a
collaborative action research to improve our
practice in English instruction. Since the
problems are mostly related to the teaching of
listening, we decided to make efforts to
improve students’ listening skills by making
use of the available facilities those are digital
media.
Research Methods
Type of study
This study is a classroom action research
study. This classroom action research design
adapted the modification of Burns model (1999:
p.33) by Madya (2006: p.67) which involves
four main steps in a cycle of research, those are:
(1) planning; (2) action; (3) observation and (4)
reflection.
Setting of the research
This study was conducted at State Junior
High School 5 Panggang, Gunungkidul,
Yogyakarta. This school is a small school at the
border area between Gunungkidul and Bantul
with only three classes, i.e Grade 7, 8 and 9.
There were only about 75 students who study in
this school. They are from Bantul and
Gunungkidul regency.
Even though it is a small school, it is quite
well facilitated. There is an internet hotspot
owned by the school. This connection can help
teachers to prepare materials and activities for
the teaching and learning process. The students
also can make use of about 11 PCs which have
internet connection 24 hours. It also facilitates
teachers and staffs with four laptops and one

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net book. Those technologies can be used in the
teaching and learning process to help teachers
improving the quality of the instruction.
Besides, the school also provides three LCD
projectors for the teaching and learning process.
I tried to optimally use those facilities to
improve the learning process. With the
technologies provided at school and referred to
the current curriculum, I conducted an action
research in Grade VIII of SMPN 5 Panggang in
Semester 1 academic year 2013/2014. As
explained in the research procedure, the study
was done in many steps. The plan step was
done in March to June 2013 which was in
academic year 2012/2013 but the action was
done in the the academic year 2013/2014 from
September to November.
Subject of the research
This collaborative action research study
involved me as the teacher, my two colleagues
in this school as my collaborators, my peer
collaborator and the principal. Together with
the students of Grade VIII, we were the subjects
of this action research study.
Procedure
The procedure of this classroom action
research is as follows. The first stage is
planning. In this phase, my collaborators and I
discussed the problems we gathered in the
preliminary study and agreed to use digital
media in improving the teaching of listening in
the classroom. We then set a set of actions. To
realize the actions, I designed the course grid of
the action research, lesson plan, materials and
digital media and then I discussed the design
with my collaborators to get feedback for its
revision.
The second stage is action. After the
planning stage, my collaborators and I did the
action. I used the materials and digital media in
the teaching and learning process. In the
listening instruction, I taught my students
through the modified three-stage listening
proposed by Field (2008: pp.17-21) as
mentioned in the conceptual framework in the
previous chapter. Therefore, I gave students
some activities, those are: (1) using pictures to
direct students’ attention into the lesson, (2)
using audio media to do extensive listening
activities, (3) using audio media to do intensive
practices on pronunciation, and (4) using the
digital media to apply listening comprehension
activities.

The third one is observation. During the
implementation or the action, to gather all of
the information related to the process of the
instruction, observations had been done by my
collaborators. My collaborators observed, wrote
field notes and also recorded the teaching and
learning process using electronic devices such
as video recorder and camera.
The last step in a cycle is reflection, i.e
reflecting of what had been done. In this step,
my collaborators and I discussed the teaching
and learning process in the classroom and
identified the problem arisen then found out the
solution to revise the design of the next cycle.
We also evaluated and described the results of
the effect. From the analysis, we decided to do
further cycle of the classroom action research to
improve the result or to stop it when we were
already satisfied.
Instruments and Data Collection Techniques
In this classroom action research study, the
data consisted of qualitative data and
quantitative ones. They were collected through
the following techniques (Burns, 1999: pp.85105; McNiff et al, 1996: pp.87-104; and Lodico
et al, 2010: pp.330-345): (1) observation using
observational
recording
sheet,
(2)
interview/written testimony, (3) rating with
rating format, (4) photograph/audio/video
recording, and (5) performance test.
Data Analysis Technique
The qualitative data as the main data are
the description of the teaching and learning
process, such as: teacher, students, media and
the situation in the classroom gathered from
field-note, interview, transcript of recordings
and the photograph. They were analyzed using
interactive analysis model by Miles and
Huberman (1994): data reduction, data display,
and conclusion drawing. On the other hand, the
quantitative data were analyzed through
descriptive statistics. Those data are the results
of the test and quantification of the ratings.
They were summarized in the frequency tables
and/or polygons and pie diagrams.
Research Results and Discussion
The results of this study will be discussed
below.
Results in Cycle I
The report of research process in Cycle I
will describe the process of planning, action

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and observation and reflection. According to
the results of reflection in this cycle, a revised
plan was made to be presented in the next cycle.
There are some points to be highlighted in
Cycle I during the main activity as the planned
actions. Those points will be analysed as
follows.
Using pictures to direct students’ attention into
the lesson
Pictures as the visual media have some
advantages as outlined in Chapter 2. Some of
those advantages which drove me use visuals in
the pre-listening activity are: (1) attracting/
directing attention; (2) motivating learners; and
(3) recalling prior learning (Newby et al, 2000:
pp.103-4 and Smaldino et al, 2007: pp.55-56).
Recognizing those advantages, I presented a
picture to drag students’ attention to the lesson
and direct them to the topic/materials learnt by
making use of some prior learning
The use of pictures during Cycle I caused
students to be actively involved in the teaching
and learning process. It motivated them to learn.
It also directed them to focus on the lesson. The
use of some familiar pictures or photographs
such as photographs of their friends or seniors
was also helpful. They were led to dig up more
information or retrieved their previous
knowledge which helped them to learn.
Using audio media to do extensive listening
activities
The activities in Cycle I were designed to
teach some language functions or expressions
to the students. To do so, some examples of
dialogues were needed. They were dialogues
containing the examples of the expressions in
asking for, giving and refusing goods/services
and admitting and denying fact. In each
meeting, audio media were played to present
the dialogues. They were played in the whilstlistening activities which were divided into
extensive and intensive listening.
The use of audio media in the extensive
listening activity could facilitate students find
the general information of the dialogues and
improve their involvement in the listening class
through a pair discussion. It means that it
slowly facilitated students to recognize the
communicative functions of the texts (Macro
skill 12). Another evidence of the advantage of
audio recording in this activity was their
recognition of the word “recording”. Beside,

this type of media gives benefit to the users
through its flexibility to be replayed.
Using audio media to do intensive practices on
pronunciation
Since good mastery of basic rules of
pronunciation is one of fundamental things to
improve English listening skills, I paid more
attention to my students’ pronunciation and
tried to deal with it in my classroom. To do so, I
gave intensive practice on pronunciation
through audio media by giving them some
English words or expressions and their
pronunciation. The pronunciation intensive
practices were aimed at enabling students to: (1)
retain the chunks of language at different length
in short-term memory; (2) distinguish among
the distinctive sounds of English; and (3)
recognize English stress patterns and intonation.
The results of the observation and
transcript of the interview show that using
audio media in doing intensive practice on the
pronuncition made students: retain the chunks
of language such as “sure”; “Yes Mam” and
“No thanks and recognize the stress patterns
and intonation of those utterances. Besides,
they also got two advantages in once i.e
maintaining their listening and speaking skills.
They were not only trained to recognize the
English words and expressions but also to
produce those words and expressions.
Using the digital media to conduct listening
comprehension activities
There are some activities that can be
applied in the listening comprehension. In
Cycle I, true/ false questions were given.
Teacher’s guidance was still needed in the
listening comprehension activities using digital
media. Students also found difficulties in doing
the tasks due to the terms “true” and “false”.
Beside, repetition played a crucial role in
improving students’ listening comprehension.
In this cycle, they still found difficulties to
comprehend the spoken texts or the dialogues
from the recordings.
Reflection in Cycle I
There were some activities which were
believed to be successful in involving students
in the classroom and improving their listening
skills. Those activities were: (1) using pictures
in the pre-listening activities, (2) using audio
media in the extensive listening activities, (3)
using audio media in the pronunciation

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intensive practices, and (4) using audio media
in the listening comprehension activities. Those
activities were implemented again in the
upcoming cycle.
However, there were some problems faced
during this Cycle. The audio and visual media
were not clear so my collaborators and I needed
to revise it. Then, my teaching technique also
needed to be changed especially in the way I
speak or explain the materials which were too
fast for some students. Reflecting on those
results, my collaborators and I agreed to
continue the action through some revisions of
plans.
Results in Cycle II
Similar to the process report in Cycle I,
this report will describe the process of planning,
action and observation and reflection. This
cycle tried to accommodate the data and
information gathered during the previous cycle.
The information then was used as a resource of
improving the quality of the teaching of
listening through digital media. The report of
the action in Cycle II below will also highlight
some points that are important. Those are points
investigated in the process report in Cycle I.
Using pictures to direct students’ attention to
the lesson
According to the result of reflections in
Cycle I, the use of pictures was able to attract
the students’ mind into the topic in the prelistening activity. For this reason, pitures were
still used in Cycle II with revision on the choice
of pictures with better resolution. Almost
similar to the meetings in Cycle I, the visuals/
pictures in the teaching of listening in Cycle II
helped the students link their daily lives to their
materials.
This visual support directed them to the
lesson and also improved their active learning.
The active learning was shown in the students’
feedback for their peers when one of them gave
the wrong answer like when I asked them about
the symbol of Android, a female student
delivered her opinion loudly, “boneka ijo”, the
other students revised her answer by saying
“android”.
Good pictures and the audio recordings
were used in the teaching of listening, the
instructional process was interesting and they
enjoyed the class. They were not easily bored
anymore. As mentioned in the beginning of this
chapter, one of the problems owned by the

teenage students was the boredom in the
classroom. By making use of the digital media,
this problem was slowly overcome.
Using audio media to do extensive listening
activities
The second reflection on Cycle I was
related to the audio media which presented
some examples of dialogues containing the
intended expressions. They played important
roles in the teaching of listening in Cycle I. On
the other hand, the audio recordings in Cycle II
gave the examples of simple monologues in the
form of announcement and advertisement.
Unlike dialogues which involves turn-taking of
two or more speakers in the recording and
usually using short utterances, monologues
provides the students with longer utterances
with no turn-taking during the speech. To train
students’ listening skills to monologues, they
were given an extensive listening activity in
which they were asked to listen to the audio
recording and guess what the recording was
about.
The audio media supported by the
appropriate visuals helped students understand
the general information of the monologues.
They were more active in the instruction and
they could be involved in a pair discussion
actively through performing the extensive
listening.
The audio media used during the action
were useful to make students happy during the
instruction and that they were actively involved
in the listening instructional process. The media
also succeeded in improving their listening
skills so that they could comprehend the texts.
Using audio media to do intensive practices on
pronunciation
Reflecting on the intensive pronunciation
practices in the beginning of Cycle I, some
students were still shy in pronouncing the
words correctly. They were not confident and
afraid of making mistakes. In the last meeting
of that cycle, more students wanted to practice
pronouncing the words and expressions even
made jokes of them but they still faced some
difficulties. To give more practice on
pronunciation, in this cycle, I also gave
intensive pronunciation practice to them.
The students’ pronunciation sometimes
still used the stress and intonation in Bahasa
Indonesia. However, the good side of
pronunciation intensive practices in Cycle II,

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they showed better attitude. They did not laugh
at each other as they did before. The intensive
practice applied in this cycle was also above the
word and phrase level. It also dealt with the
stress and intonation of sentence level.
Repetition in pronunciation was needed so that
the students had enough input for their practice.
Giving them chance to listen to the model more
than once helped them pronounce the words
accurately using the right stress and intonation
so they did not only made a babble. Through
doing these intensive practices, they were able
to pronounce the English words or phrases with
better pronunciation and they were not shy
anymore.
Using audio media to apply word recognition
One of the listening micro skills according
to Richards (1983) in Brown (2007: p.308) is
recognizing grammatical word classes. In this
cycle, to make students improve their listening
skills, an additional listening activity was given.
The students were asked to listen to the played
monologues and while they were listening to
them, they wrote down as many words as they
could recognize
The average of the recognized words in
Meeting 1 and 2 in Cycle II can be presented in
the diagram below.

Figure 1. the Average of Recognized
Words in Cycle II
The figure shows that given relatively
similar length of spoken texts (text 1 consisted
of 45 words and text 2 consisted of 49 words)
using audio media, students could recognize
more words in the second meeting (9 to 10
words) than those in the first meeting (7 to 8
words). It shows that the audio media helped
students in recognizing the words so they
slowly showed the progress of their skills in
recognizing the words.
Using the digital media to apply listening
comprehension activities

Reflecting on the result of the use of digital
media in the listening comprehension activities
in Cycle I, I changed the activities of listening
comprehension in this cycle. There were
various activities that could be given in the
listening comprehension activities. The
activities were not only in the form of True/
false activity which sometimes was confusing
for the students and was difficult for them.
During Cycle II, they still had difficulty in
comprehending the word “cannot” which
resulted in incorrect answer. The positive side
of using the digital media in this activity is the
available feedback. Feedback was needed by
the students to help them analyze their strength
and weaknesses.
Reflection in Cycle II
The actions implemented in this cycle
resulted in good improvements. The additional
action that is using audio media in word
recognition also resulted in the improvement of
word recognition skill. However, there were
still some students who had not comprehended
the texts as shown in the result of the
performance that there were only 4 students out
of 18 who could pass the minimum mastery
criteria (KD 2.1=65). This number is equal to
22.22%. The low percentage shows that the
students still needed an effort to improve their
listening skills to monologue. To overcome the
problems, my collaborators suggested me to use
other types of digital media which incorporated
audio and visual media.
Results in Cycle III
Similar to the process report in Cycle I and
II, this cycle will describe the process of
planning, action and observation and reflection.
This cycle tried to accommodate the data and
information gathered during the previous cycle.
The information then was used as a resource of
improving the quality of the teaching of
listening through digital media.
Referring to the reports in Cycle I and II,
there will be some important points to be
discussed in Cycle III. They are as follows:
Using pictures to direct students’ attention into
the lesson
Reflecting on the use of pictures in Cycle I
and II which were able to direct students’ mind
into the topic, visuals were still be used in the
teaching of listening in Cycle III

8

In Cycle III, students were active in
delivering their answers. They tried to answer
the questions related to the picture although the
answer was incorrect. The feedback was also
given to them responding to the incorect answer.
They were actively involved in the classroom
discussion which was followed by some jokes
by students. The joke following the picture and
students’ answer made the classroom more
lively
Beside, the student’s written testimony
also shows the same argument. One of the
students felt that she could be more motivated if
there were more funny pictures.
Using digital stories to do extensive listening
activity
During the reflection in Cycle II, my
collaborators and I agreed to try using other
type of media that was the audio-visual media
to change the audio media in presenting the
texts. As mentioned earlier to present the audiovisual media, digital stories were made. In this
cycle, these media then were projected in the
classroom to present monologues (descriptive
and recount). In the beginning of whilstlistening activity, the digital stories were
presented to do the extensive listening activity.
The digital story which presented the
audio-visuals media could attract students’
attention. They could watch it carefully. The
students could also enjoy the teaching and
learning more when they got a set of audiovisual media. As evidence, they smiled when
they saw something interesting. Besides
attracting students’ attention, this type of media
is also appropriate to teach descriptive texts. As
a result, after the video was played and they
were asked what things that they could hear and
see, they could answer it even in Bahasa
Indonesia.
Through the digital story, the students also
succesfully guessed what the monologue was
about right after it was played. They watched it
carefully and sometimes were interested in the
things presented in the video so they smiled or
pointed to something presented in the video.
However, some students only watched the
video (digital story) without any expression.
The video or digital stories grabbed the
students’ attention, made them happy during the
teaching and learning process and helped them
comprehending the English (texts) and able to
find the general information of the texts.

Using audio media to do intensive practice on
pronunciation
From the reflections in Cycle II, the audio
media used in intensive pronunciation practices
made students happy and not shy to pronounce
the English words. They were also grateful that
their pronunciation (stress and intonation) was
better. Referring to the data, audio media was
still used in the pronunciation intensive practice
in Cycle III. However, different type of
activities was given. The intensive practice in
Cycle III was aimed at enabling students to
distinguish words with similar sounds
The use of audio media in Cycle III made
the students enthusiastic in doing the intensive
pronunciation practice as can be seen from
some students who clapped their hands when
they could choose the right word. It also slowly
enabled students to distinguish the distinctive
sounds of English
Using digital stories to apply the word
recognition activities
From the reflection in Cycle II, the
additional tasks using audio media in the word
recognition activity enabled students to be more
sensitive in recognizing the words. Different
from those in Cycle II, in this cycle, digital
stories were used to apply this activity. During
this activity, students demonstrated more
experienced behaviour in recognizing words
from monologues. This activity was also
effective to improve the students’ listening
skills. They could listen to the media and wrote
the words that they could hear. There were
more words written by the students during the
listening. In the first play, they already
recognized eight to thirteen words which were
higher than those in Cycle II (7 to 10 words).
The activity in recognizing words in the
second meeting of this cycle also resulted in the
same enthusiasm for students. In the first
meeting the monologue given consisted of 122
words, on the other hand, the text in second
meeting was 225 words long. With the longer
words, they could recognize more words as
presented in the following diagram.

9

15.50
15.00
14.50
14.00
13.50
13.00
12.50
12.00
11.50
numbers of
words

Meeting 1

Meeting 2

12.83

14.89

Figure 2. The Average of Recognized
Words in Cycle III
The figure shows that the students
recognized more words in the second meeting
comparing to those in Meeting 1. It means that
the played digital stories significantly improved
their skills in listening especially in recognizing
words.
Digital stories in the recognizing word
activity succeeded in enabling students to take a
part in the listening class and improving their
listening skills in the word recognition. It also
shows that the played media which combine
visuals and naration in the form of audio were
able to help the students recognize the words
better. It is in line with Mayer & Moreno (1998;
2001) who believe that students will learn better
through animation and audio than animation
and text (Clark & Mayer, 2007: 316-7; Robyler
& Doering, 2013: 166).
Using the digital stories to apply listening
comprehension activities
The use of audio media in the listening
comprehension activities in Cycle II had helped
some students improve their comprehension of
spoken texts but not all of them had reached the
minimum mastery criteria. As reflected on the
performance test result in Cycle II that there
were only 22.22% of the students who could
passed the KKM (minimum mastery criteria).
Reflecting on that results, digital stories were
presented in this cycle and then were also used
to apply the listening comprehension activities.
Digital media used in the teaching of
listening succeeded in improving their listening
(skills) so that they could comprehend Englih
(texts) more. This improvement made them
happy during and after the teaching and
learning process.

Reflection in Cycle III
The actions done in Cycle III were
successfully motivating students through
pictures, lifting up their interest to listen to the
texts, enabling them to guess the general
information of the played digital stories,
improving their skills in recognizing the words
and improving their comprehension of the
monologues. We then agreed to stop the actions.
The above research findings were also
supported by the interviews done to my four
students. They were chosen randomly from
eighteen students in Grade VIII. The interviews
were informal interview, so even there was an
interview protocol but there was a possibility to
ask some questions which were not listed there.
This model of interview was the appropriate
one to gather the information from my students
since in the previous cycles (Cycle I and II),
they were reluctant to be interviewed. They said
that they were shy and afraid of being
interviewees. For that reason, the interviews in
Cycle III were done informally and to replace
the interview section in Cycle I and II, they
were asked to make written testimonies.
The interview succeeded in gathering the
data related to students’ opinion toward the use
of digital media in their listening class. They
said that the use of digital media made them
happy and it was good since they were able to
understand the lesson. The following statements
were their testimonies during the interviews.
Td : Ya...menurut saya..saya itu cukup
mengerti berbicara bahasa Inggris
dengan cukup jelas.
(Well...I think I understand enough
the text and can speak English
clearly)
E : Menurut saya cukup bagus dan
menurut saya pun saya mendapat
pengalaman
lebih
dan
bisa
memahami apa yang guru ajarkan
pada saya.
(In my opinion it is good enough and
I also get experience more and
understand what the teacher taught to
me)
A : Hmm..menurut saya itu cukup bagus
karena anu itu..materinya itu sama
dengan materi sekolahan itu lho.
(Hmm..in my opinion it is good
enough because..well...the materials
are the same as those we learn at
school)
N : Merasa senang. Kemudian ngga bisa

10

Bahasa Inggris itu jadi bisa...
(I am happy. Then, I can understand
English better now)
From the testimonies above, we can
conclude that they had positive opinion toward
the use of digital media in the teaching of
listening. Later, I gave them a further question
related to the strengths and weaknesses of the
digital media in the listening instruction. When
they were asked about the strengths, some of
them talked about the presence of pictures and
videos which motivated and inspired them
during the teaching and learning process. Their
complete testimonies are as follows:
Td : Ya kelebihannya itu ya...banyak
inspirasi ya? Ya misalnya itu ada
picture – picture (/pictur-pictur/) itu
lho gambar-gambar.
(Well, its strength is many
inspiration? Well for example there
are pictures)
E : Kelebihannya itu, ya dengan digital
media itu dengan dimotivasi seperti
gambar-gambar
terus
dengan
berbagai video yang lainnya yang
ada museum dan pantai-pantai gitu.
(Its strength is using the digital
media is motivating with pictures
and some videos containing museum
and beaches)
A : Ya..ya menambah itu tadi menambah
pengetahuan.
(Well, it gives more knowledge)
N : Kelebihannya ya..ya ada gambarnya
gitu lho. Terus bisa..bisa menulis
dengan bahasa inggris.
(The strength is there is pictures in it.
And then...we can write in English)
Those testimonies show that digital media
which include pictures and videos were able to
movitate students to learn and acquire
knowledge. From the last testimony given by N,
she mentioned the strength of digital media was
related to her ability to write English. This
testimony is a little bit similar to the testimony
delivered by Td in the previous section who
said that he could speak English clearly enough
after digital media were used in the instruction.
It could be concluded that the use of digital
media was not merely helping students in their
listening skills but also other skills (speaking
and writing).

After giving their opinion about the
strength of digital media use in the teaching of
listening, I tried to gather their opinion about its
weaknesses. I found out that they complained
on the unclear pictures, sound and writing as
the weaknesses of the media. Below are their
testimonies:
Td : Kekurangannya itu gambarnya
masih kurang jelas itu lho masih ada
bruwet-bruwetnya.
(its weakness is the pictures are
unclear)
E : Kalau menurut saya kekurangannya
itu, suaranya kurang jelas terus
gambarnya kurang jelas juga.
(In my opinion the weakness is the
unclear sound and pictures)
A : Kekurangannya
itu
saat
mendengarkan..mendengarkan
rekaman itu tu suaranya tu ngga
jelas gimana gitu.
(The weakness is when we are
listening to the recording, the sound
is unclear)
N : Tulisannya kurang jelas bu.
(The writing is unclear, Mam)
During the action, my collaborators and I
had tried to overcome those weaknesses by
revising the media and changing the facilities
used. The students’ opinion would be one of
considerations in presenting the similar media
in the future.
After finding out students’ opinion of the
strengths and weaknesses of the digital media, I
asked them to compare the teaching of listening
without digital media to that with digital media.
Below are their answers:
Td : Saya lebih suka dengan media
digital karena meme...mempermudah
memahami.....Awalnya itu pakai
media digital dan saat menerangkan
guru.
(I like the teaching with digital
media more because...make me
easier
to
understand...In
the
beginning, the teaching and learning
process uses digital media and then
the teacher explains the materials)
E : Kalau menurut saya lebih enak
sekarang karena selain media
digital, ada penjelasan dari guru
juga.
(In my opinion the current teaching
and learning process is better

11

A

N

because beside the digital media,
there is also teacher’s explanation)
: Lebih baik yang ini. Karena
menyenangkan terus ya..ngga bikin
bosen lah.
(This teaching and learing process
with digital media is better because
it is interesting and does not make
me bored)
: Lebih enak yang pakai ini.
(It is better with digital media)

The testimonies above show that they liked
the current teaching using the digital media but
some of them said that they still needed the
teacher in explaining the materials.
In the further interview, I tried to find out
their feeling during the instructional process.
Mostly said that they were happy as cited below:
Td : Saya cukup merasa senang karena
saya itu menambah wawasan itu lho.
(I feel happy because I can get more
knowledge)
E
: Sejujurnya sih ngantuk ya... Tapi
seru..
(Frankly speaking I am sleepy..but
it’s fun)
A : Ya baik sih..senang saya itu.
(It is good I am happy)
N : Ya senang bu.
(I am happy Mam)
Beside the testimonies in the above points,
there are more information that was gathered
during the interview such as the students’
response to joke as a motivating part in the
teaching and learning process and so on. The
complete transcript of the interview is enclosed
in Appendix V B.
Reflecting on what we gathered, we agreed
to stop the action. As a conclusion, we also
agreed that the digital media could improve the
Grade VIII students’ listening skills at SMPN 5
Panggang.
Conclusions and Suggestions
Conclusions
Based on the findings of this classroom
action research study discussed in the previous
chapter, some conclusion can be drawn. Those
are. First, the digital media are believed to
improve the listening instrutional processes
which lead into the improvement of students’
listening skills.
Second, pictures in the pre-listening
activity are found to increase students’ interest

in the lesson, direct their minds into the topic,
and motivate them to learn. Third, audio media
make students happy during the instruction and
actively involved in the listening instructional
process, and enable them to: recognize the
communicative functions of the texts, retain the
chunks of language, distinguish among the
distinctive sounds of English, recognize English
stress patterns and intonation, recognize words
in the given spoken texts, and comprehend the
texts.
Fourth, the digital stories (audio-visual
media) are able to grab students’ attention,
make them happy, facilitate them to focus on
the monologues and comprehend them better so
they are able to infer situations, participants,
goals of the spoken texts.
Suggestions
Some suggestions below are addressed to
students, English teachers, and the school. First
is for the students. To be able to communicate
in English, one of the skills that should be
owned is listening. Through listening, the input
of the language are acquired. Students need to
get as much input as possible in order to acquire
the language. Through listening, there is
information that we could gather. Listening is
not as difficult as what the students think. If the
students get used to listen to the English texts,
they will be familiar with those words/ texts.
Listening can also be done for enjoyment.
They can listen to English texts for fun. Various
media can be used as resources of listening:
songs, news, movie and etc which are now
easily accessed and available on line. They can
make use the available facilities at school such
as internet and PCs to access those kinds of
language resources rather than to overuse them
to update the social media.
Second suggestion is for the English
teachers. Looking at the importance of listening
in language learning, the teachers need to be
creative in giving the activities. There are many
alternatives of listening activities that can be
done during the teaching of listening. Those
activities can be realized by making use of the
available facilities. A teacher can design a set of
digital media or download the available media
from the internet and bring those media into the
classroom. The various media can ease the
students’ boredom and motivate them to learn
more.
The third one is for school. The findings of
this classroom action research can be used and

12

shared to the other classes. Digital media can be
used to teach other classes, but ongoing
reflection of the actions is needed to make the
instructional process more effective. The
process must be supported by the available
facilities. Some upgrading of the facilities are
needed. The available LCD projectors should
be taken care of well so they are not easily
broken. The appropriate use of screen on the
wall for the projected slide is needed to present
clear visuals to the students. The clear speakers
are also needed to give best quality sound to the
students. Beside, the classrooms also need
curtains to be used when necessary.
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