A Survey of UNISMA English Undergraduate Students’ Perceptions about the Online Listening Courses during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic which has spread all over the world recently has changed many aspects of human life, even on the educational side. Since this pandemic requires every level of educations to conduct the teaching and learning classes in online courses, all aspects of educations perceived the benefits and even the difficulties through this online course method. The issues of advantages and disadvantages of online learning may also be found in a language learning context, especially in listening courses, since this course is usually done face-toface in a silent and focused class’ condition. Therefore, this study aimed at measuring the undergraduate students’ perceptions on the online listening courses during this COVID-19 pandemic. This study used a quantitative research design with the survey research method. Random sampling was used as the technique of determining the subjects of this study. The population here was all undergraduate students of the English Education Department UNISMA who had already attended the online listening courses. The instrument used in this study was online questionnaire consist of 30 statements with the 4-scales of the Likert scale. The validity and reliability of the instrument were measured before it was delivered to the real participants of the study. The samples who responded to the questionnaire in Google Form were 74 students from the first semester until the sixth semester of undergraduate English students of UNISMA. In analyzing the data, the researcher used the average formula of Google Spreadsheet. The findings were analyzed by the whole average score from the highest to the lowest result. A high score indicates that the respondents perceive agreement with the questionnaire item whereas a low score implies that they do not agree with the statement in the item. Moreover, the average of every part of the questionnaire will also be analyzed to explore the respondents’ perception of each item of the questionnaire. Then, the result of each number was compared to the total of 4 scores on the scale. If the result is higher than 2, which is half of the 4 scales, it means the good perception result of the item is high, and vice versa. The main finding in this study showed that every item of the questionnaire got high response from the participants. All of them gained above 2 scores on the 4 scale. It can be concluded that the majority of the students agreed that online listening courses were suitable and comfortable to join the teaching and learning process of listening in this pandemic era. However, the students’ perceived difficulties towards this online listening method were also positive. It can be concluded that although the students feel that online listening courses were beneficial for them in the learning process in the pandemic condition, they still have difficulties in doing this kind of learning method. Therefore, online listening courses do have a positive side for the students, but the problems that they feel are also need to get more attention. The suggestions were given to listening lecturers and to future researchers who want to conduct similar research for further studies. For the lecturers, they can apply some applications in the process of teaching listening online such as WhatsApp, YouTube, Google Classroom, Google Form, Zoom, Edmodo, Facebook, etc. These variations will help to make the students not bored in joining online listening courses. The lecturers also can choose the appropriate materials based on the topic to increase students’ interest in learning to listen online. While for future researchers, they can use a mix-method research design in which the researchers can include open-ended interviews for the respondents in order to get deeper analysis. They also can conduct a similar study yet to the different participants and may be conducted to measure the specific tool to teach listening via online.