The Listening Comprehension of the Eighth Grade Students of SMP Bhakti Praja Kudus in the Academic Year 2011/2012 Taught by Using Breaking News English

In learning English there are four skills students should have mastered and listening comprehension as one of these skills is considered to be the one having the most important role in building communication skill. Although listening comprehension is the basic skill in understanding English, it is the most difficult to master of all areas of language skills because English has different elements that can cause some difficulties for Indonesian student. Not only that, English teaching sometimes still uses monotone activities in the classroom, therefore the majority of the Indonesian students’ test results are still below the Minimum Standard Competency. A media is surely be used to help teacher in arousing the students’ interest to study English. Media are not only pictures and stories, but internet sites can be applied to teach language in the classroom too and not be used for entertaining purposes only. One of them is Breaking News English.com which has over hundreds topics, dealing with listening comprehension which are updated every three days. This research has a purpose to find out the answer from the statement of the problem, is there is any significant difference between the achievement in listening comprehension of the eighth grade students of SMP Bhakti Praja Kudus before and after being taught by using Breaking News English.com. This is a quantitative research, which relies on quantitative data based on computation and measurement, operational variables and statistics. The method of the research is experiment. This design of the study is the quasi-experimental method with pre-test and posttest. The data are taken from the synonym match, phrase match, and fill in gaps tests. This research applied a simple random sampling technique to get samples. After the students are given the pre test, they are given the treatment for four meetings. Then, the data is analyzed using the t-test method to find out whether there is significant difference between the achievement in listening comprehension before and after being taught by using Breaking News English.com. The use of Breaking News English.com in teaching listening comprehension can help the students’ listening comprehension. It is supported by significant result of the post test which was higher (58,2) than the result of pre test which was (34,1). From the fact above, it is safe to conclude that Breaking News English.com gives positive effects in teaching listening comprehension. The use of Breaking News English.com in teaching listening comprehension shows good results. The English teacher of Junior High School should consider using it in teaching listening comprehension. It is better that the teacher uses monologue recordings, and play the recording at least three times. It takes times for students to understand the monologue vocabulary and the students have different abilities to memorize and to comprehend them. Beside students can visit Breaking News English.com site to learn individually and in group for better result in listening comprehension as they can exercise by themselves at home