The Utilization of Duolingo to Improve Students’ Motivation and Listening Comprehension Achievement

Abstract

The use of technology is highly recommended in the scope of education. One of the alternative learning application is Duolingo application that can be used in improving students’ motivation and listening comprehension achievement. This research was aimed at describing the effectiveness of the use of the Duolingo application to improve students’ motivation and listening comprehension achievement. The method was quantitative and the researcher employed the quasi-experimental with two groups in this research namely experimental group and control group. The data in this study were obtained from the results of the pretest, the posttest, and questionnaire. The results from experimental showed that posttest was higher than pretest score with (91.32 > 66.26), and because the data of this study was not normally distributed the researcher used Wilcoxon Test to see the difference improvement as an alternative to changed paired sample t-test, moreover the Asymp Sig. (2-tailed) of 0.000 <0.05, it can be concluded that there was a significant improvement on students’ listening comprehension learning outcomes between pretest and posttest data. So, "there was an effect of using the Duolingo learning application on improving listening comprehension achievement. This study also utilized questionnaire to seek out the student’s responses in using Duolingo application, the results revealed that 86% of students agreed that the utilization of Duolingo can improve learning motivation and the students wanted to continue to learn with Duolingo application. From the description above, it can be concluded that Duolingo is the effective way to improve students’ motivation and listening comprehension achievement in seventh graders of SMP N 3 Palembang.