The Effectiveness Of Story Weaver On Eighth-Grade Students’ Listening Comprehension

Abstract

This research investigates the effectiveness of Story Weaver, a digital storytelling platform, in enhancing the listening comprehension of eighth-grade students at SMPN 2 Tarokan. Motivated by students’ struggles in understanding spoken English—due to limited vocabulary, fast-paced speech, and lack of appropriate materials—and teachers' difficulties in providing the engaging listening media, this study aimed to address those challenges. Employing a quantitative method with pre-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design, the research involved 33 students from class 8D SMPN 2 Tarokan. Data were collected using listening comprehension tests and questionnaires. Results showed a significant improvement in students' listening scores, rising from a mean of 62.45 in the pretest to 81.73 in the posttest. The Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test yielded a significance level of 0.000, confirming the media’s effectiveness. Questionnaire responses also revealed positive student perceptions of Story Weaver, particularly in vocabulary recognition, contextual understanding, and engagement. In conclusion, Story Weaver is proven to be an effective tool to enhance listening comprehension and motivation. Thus, this is recommended for use in junior high school listening lesson