Engaging Indonesian EFL students in listening report texts through media audiobooks: Implementation process and skill improvement

Based on the preliminary observation in SMP Muhammadiyah 10 Bandung, there are listening problems faced by students. First, the ability to listen is still lacking. The researcher gives them a test to listen to a report text and they must answer the blank with vocabulary, but some of them were still confused to fill the answer because they cannot write vocabulary correctly and they did not understand the listening because any unfamiliar words that make them cannot write the words or sentences. The average score in that test was 54. It means the average score is low because the Minimum Criteria of Mastery Learning (KKM) in English is 75. Second, they were not interested in listening to material about the report text. They kept talking when the audio was playing. Third, the narrator in the audio is fast. It makes them did not understand the content of the text by listening. The aim of this research is to find out how the use of audiobooks in listening report texts engages the Indonesian EFL students in the learning process and improves their listening skills. The design of this research was the mix method with the explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach. The sample was limited to students of class 8B of SMP Muhammadiyah 10 Bandung. Listening pretest score and listening posttest score as instruments given to the 25 students. The results of those scores were analyzed to find out the significant difference between the students’ listening ability before and after using audiobooks by using Paired T-test in SPSS 20. In addition, observation sheet as instruments to observe the treatment in this research. The result of the average pretest score before using audiobooks is 72 and the average posttest score after using audiobooks is 78. It means that there is an improvement after treatment by using audiobooks. The result from the computation by SPSS 20.0 showed that the Paired Sample T-Test statistic of significance (2 tailed) is 0.00. It can be interpreted that Ho is rejected and Ha is accepted. It means that there is a significant improvement in students’ listening report text through audiobooks. In calculating Cohens’ d-test, the result showed that students’ score mostly increases or have an effect after given the treatment using audiobooks. The value of Cohens’ d-test is 0.81, which means the improvement or impact of students’ listening in report text through audiobooks is LARGE. There are three processes of using Audiobooks based on Mohamed (2018) that are used in this treatment. First, Pre-listening focused on prepare and motivate the students in listening to the report text. Second, While-listening focused on the listening activity, identify the generic structure of report text and write down the unfamiliar words. Third, Post-Listening focused on students’ discussion and the teacher gives feedback for students in listening report text. Thus, it can be concluded that the implementation process of audiobooks in learning activity especially in listening, engages the Indonesian EFL students in the learning process and improves their listening skills. The recommendation is should more encourage the students to increase their listening skills such as try to implement in other kinds of texts; narrative text, descriptive text, recount text, etc. And also, it can be implemented in Senior High schools or Universities