USING YOUTUBE AS TEACHING MEDIA TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ LISTENING

SKILL

Rizky Aulia
170102030656
[email protected]
Abstract
This study aims at (l) describing how YouTube can use as teaching media to improve
students’ listening skill and (2) explaining the teaching and learning process when YouTube
are used in the class. In this paper, there will also explain you some theories about
understanding the skill, listening skills, procedure of teaching the skill, understanding the
nature of YouTube and basic feature of YouTube app. In The result will show you, how to use
YouTube as teaching media, and what can YouTube do as teaching media. The research hope
this paper give reader knowledge and make the teaching and learning activities more
interesting for students.

Keywords: YouTube Videos, Listening, YouTube Apps

A. Introduction

Nowadays, English is one of international languages in the world. Mastering

English is important because we use English to communicate each other from another
countries. But in Indonesia English is only used in classroom and some particular
requirements in a proficiency test. English is their foreign language. As compulsory
subject in every level of education, English is thought to the students for minimally six
years from junior until senior high school. Some elementary school teach English but it
is rare. Many students feel hardly when they learn English in every English skills,
especially listening skills.
Listening is English skill that should be mastering. The skill is provided some
audios to students, and students get something or understand the audios, audios might
be dialog, monolog, song, story, news, and many others. Not only audio, when we talk
to some people and, we understand what the people have said. It is a part of listening.
In teaching listening, especially EFL students. They often feel depressed because
they don’t understand what the audio says. Since English is their foreign language, they
feel unusual with pronunciation that sometimes very different with vocabulary if they
read the vocabulary. Because the way Indonesian read and pronounce has different with
English. Using YouTube as teaching media will helps teachers to solve the problems.

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 YouTube is considered by the researchers as an alternative strategy to enhance
students ‘speaking skill. After watching YouTube-based videos, it is expected that
students can get the ideas to speak from the real environment of the speaker in order that
students will have an opportunity to do imitative, intensive, responsive, intensive,
interactive and extensive speaking performance. Students can also get new vocabulary
and the examples of pronunciation that give them the opportunity to do the
improvement. Speaking skill will be better if it is supported by the real environment or
authentic material as the students' schemata. The implementation of this strategy
includes the pre-task based phase, the task cycle, and language focus phase. This
strategy is expected to help the students solve the problems and improve the students
‘speaking achievement.
The objective of the study is to describe to what extent the use of YouTube-
based videos can improve the students’ speaking skill .
B. Literature Review
1. Listening Skill Understanding
a. The meaning of listening.
Listening is the process of receiving, constructing meaning from and
responding to spoken and/or non-verbal messages (Brownell, 2002).
Listening is an active, purposeful process of making sense of what we
hear (Helgesen, 2003).
Listening comprehension is a highly complex problem-solving activity
that can be broken down into a set of distinct sub-skills (Byrnes, 1984).
Listening is an active and interactional process in which a listener
receives speech sounds and tries to attach meaning to the spoken words. The
listener tries to understand the intended message of the oral text to respond
effectively to oral communication.
Listening and hearing are considered different process. While hearing is
considered as physical, passive and natural process, listening is physical &
mental, active and learnt process and is defined as a skill.
APPROACH TO LISTENING.
The bottom-up and top-down concepts originated from computer science
before being adopted by the field of linguistics. In computer science, bottom-
up means “data-driven” and top-down means “knowledge-driven”

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 (Field,1999). The cognitive process of listening and reading in the target
language indicates bottom-up and top-down processes in SLA (Clement,
2007). If listeners use linguistic knowledge clues such as phonemes,
syllables, words, phrases and sentences to understand, it means that they use
a bottom-up strategy. However, if they use context and prior knowledge such
as topic, genre, culture and other schema knowledge stored in long term
memory to decide the meaning, they use a top-down strategy. During a
listening process, a combination of the two processes is used to make the
text sensible for the listener. Thus, it is generally accepted that top-down and
bottom-up processes are utilized together during the listening process
(Vandergrift, 2007). Nevertheless, the aim of listening determines the
priority. To illustrate the point, think about the two situations given below:
o You are chatting with your friend, and she tells you a story about
an exam that she failed. You listen to your friend to say
something that will console her.
o One evening a friend of yours calls and invites you to her
birthday party. You carefully take note of the address, time and
day of the activity.
In the first situation, we just listen to understand the main idea and give
the expected social response. However, in the second situation, we need to
listen carefully and understand the actual words in order not to have a
problem later. While we use top down processes in the first example,
bottom-up processing is used in the second.
b. Teaching listening
1) Pre-listening
Pre-listening activities help to hear and give some clues about the
activity expectations mostly by activating schemata.

Imagine that you enter the classroom a little bit late and you see
that the teacher has already started lecturing. Most probably, it will
be difficult for you to grasp the topic and understand what is going
on. Why do you think this happens? As you do not know the context
and you do not have any prior knowledge about the context, the
context will initially be inaccessible. Consequently, pre-listening
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 activities serve the goal of ensuring students know what they need to
know before they listen. Listeners need to know things like the
speaker’s way of talking, the length of the text, the listener’s role,
information about the topic, specialized vocabulary, and the
relationship between listener and speaker (Wilson, 2008). A study
conducted by Zohrabi et al. (2015) states that learners who are
exposed to pre-listening activities performed better than those who
did not take pre-listening activities. They also assert that pre-
listening tasks are effective for students in understanding authentic
English movies.

Pre-listening activities activate the schemata and help students to

predict what they will hear. Activating schemata means activating
students’ prior knowledge. Activities to activate learners’ schemata
might include brainstorming, visuals, realia, text and words,
situations and opinions, ideas and facts. Brainstorming activities aim
to produce ideas based on a topic or a problem. Brainstorming can
be realized via a poster display in which students prepare a poster
based on a given topic, brain walking in which they walk around the
classroom and enlarge the ideas collaboratively, board writing, in
which they work in groups and they brainstorm about the same topic
or a different one, and from one to many in which students work
individually, take notes and then share the ideas with the group
(Wilson, 2008).
Besides brainstorming activities, visuals are also effective for
pre-listening activities. There is an axiom saying “a picture is worth
a thousand words. For example, a picture can be shown to students
and they can predict the ongoing. Alternatively, a sequence of
pictures can be given to students and they can tell a story related to
the picture sequence.
Using realia is also helpful in activating schemata. For example
a photo, a map, a brochure or any other object related to the listening
text make students activate their prior knowledge and help them
better understand the listening (Wilson, 2008).
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 Things to avoid during the pre-listening stage.
 A pre-listening task should not be too long. It should be
precise and clear.
 The activity should not give too much information about
the listening text. It should just introduce the topic.
 The teacher should not talk too much: he or she should let
the students talk and share their ideas.
 A pre-listening activity topic should not be too general
and unrelated to the listening text (Wilson, 2008).
2) While-Listening
While-listening activities are directly related to the listening text
and students perform the task either during the listening process or
immediately after the listening. Therefore, the teacher needs to match
the activities to the instructional goal, the listening purpose, and the
students’ proficiency level. Underwood (1989) explains the goal of
while-listening tasks as being something that helps the learners
understand the messages of the listening text. She also gives some
specific examples of while listening activities:
 “making/checking items in pictures
 Which picture?
 Storyline picture sets
 Putting pictures in order
 True/false
 Form/chart completion
 Completing grids
 Predicting
 Carrying out actions
 Multiple choice completion” (p. 49-72).
Well-designed while-listening activities help students to
understand the listening text, to give clues about how to respond, to
provide a focus, to indicate the important parts while listening, to
keep listeners alert and to permit them to understand the text’s
structure (Wilson, 2008). An example to while-listening activity is
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 “bingo”. This activity is especially enjoyable for young learners. In
this task the teacher writes a list of words on the board, which are
included in the listening text. The students individually select and
write seven words on a piece of paper. Then, they listen to the
passage and put a tick on that specific word when the word is heard.
When all the words are ticked, they shout “bingo”. It is a good
activity for selective listening even if it hinders listening extensively
(Wilson, 2008).
3) Post-Listening
In the post-listening stage, students work in detail applying both
top-down and bottom up strategies to link up the classroom activities
and their real lives (Wilson,2008).
Underwood (1989) describes the post-listening task as an activity
that is realized after the listening, merging all the work performed.
Post-listening tasks may be directly related to the pre- and while-
listening activities or they can just be loosely related to these
activities. She also asserts that post-listening tasks require more time
than the other tasks because students deal with thinking, discussing,
reflecting and writing processes. It can be named as the more
reflective part of the lesson.
“Checking and summarizing” is one activity type that can be
performed as post listening task. In this activity, first the teacher puts
students into small groups to lower individual speaking anxiety. The
teacher’s role, here, is to monitor students and to stimulate them by
attracting their attention to the related and interesting points. Then,
they share their ideas as a class and then students can summarize the
important parts. Other types of post-listening activities are
discussions, creative responses, critical responses, information
exchanges, problem solving, deconstructing the listening text and
reconstructing the listening text (Wilson, 2008).
2. The Nature of YouTube App
a. Understanding of YouTube App

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 YouTube.com, is an online video repository in which nearly any digital
video file can be stored and exhibited free of charge. Started in February
2005, YouTube hosts videos that are cumulatively currently viewed more
than 2 billion times each day (“Timeline,” 2011). While issues involving
copyright infringement and obscenity standards have often made the website
controversial, the vast array of diverse content and its organic community
interactivity make YouTube a tremendous resource for a multitude of
educational endeavors (Michael, 2011).
YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim,
who were all early employees of PayPal. Hurley had studied design
at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim
studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana–
Champaign.
Karim said the inspiration for YouTube first came from Janet Jackson's
role in the 2004 Super Bowl incident, when her breast was exposed during
her performance, and later from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Karim
could not easily find video clips of either event online, which led to the idea
of a video sharing site. Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for
YouTube was a video version of an online dating service, and had been
influenced by the website Hot or Not. Difficulty in finding enough dating
videos led to a change of plans, with the site's founders deciding to accept
uploads of any type of video.
According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley
and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005,
after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a
dinner party at Chen's apartment in San Francisco. Karim did not attend the
party and denied that it had occurred, but Chen commented that the idea that
YouTube was founded after a dinner party "was probably very strengthened
by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible".
b. Basic Features of YouTube App
You can sign up to YouTube by some steps:
a. Click YouTube.com in your Google searching.
b. Click sign up and then use your email.

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 c. You can access YouTube now.
You can access YouTube now, remember you must have an
internet connection to access YouTube.
Actually, without sign up with YouTube account you have
already can access YouTube, but you can’t upload your videos. The
benefit of sign up to YouTube is easily you to find your favorite video
by recommendation and you can upload your own videos.
3. The Implementation of App to the Skill.
Using YouTube to improve students listening skills absolutely true.
Since YouTube and other online videos are most immediately observed through
sight and sound, creative teachers can easily find new ways to use them in
teaching listening. Outside the classroom, students can watch videos with
subtitle if they feel hard to understand, it helps them to improve listening skills
step by step.
This statement is supported by magnesen (Dryden & Vos) that say,
people learn 10% with reading, 20% with listening, 30% with visual, 50% with
listening and visual, 70% with experiencing, and 90% experiencing and telling
others.
C. Discussion
1. Sample of Material
The material for listening
Title : Announcement
Class : XII
School : SMAN 1 Amuntai
Subject : English
2. Teaching Procedure
Teachers start the class as usual, greeting, warming up, etc. in the main activity,
teachers can play a video from YouTube about announcement, and students can
watch it and also listen it as an example. Next activities can be teacher can use
YouTube again but the teacher not show the video, so students just listen it, then
gives them some questions to answer.
D. Conclusion and Recommendation

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 This paper says about YouTube as teaching media in the teaching listening.
Based on the paper above teaching listening using YouTube can improve students
listening skill. YouTube provided many videos
The writers hope, there will a study that measure students score in listening class
when the media YouTube is used in teaching-learning activities. The writer also hope
there will be more explanation about YouTube, such as advantages and disadvantages
of YouTube in teaching listening skill.
E. References
Solak, Ekrem. 2016. Teaching listening skills. ISBN 978 – 605 – 9029 – 52 – 0.
Almurashi , Wael Abdulrahman. 2016. The Effective Use of Youtube Videos For
Teaching English Language in Classrooms As Supplementary Material At
Taibah University In Alula. International Journal of English Language and
Linguistics Research Vol.4, No.3, pp.32-47
Watkins, Jon & Wilkins, Michael. 2001. Using YouTube in the EFL Classroom.
Language Education in Asia, Volume 2, Issue 1
Kurniawati, Dewi. The Effectiveness of Using Youtube Video in Teaching English
Grammar Viewed From Students’ Attitude.
Harmer, Jeremy. 2010. How to Teach English. UK: Stanton Associates.

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