THE UTILIZATION OF DUOLINGO TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ MOTIVATION AND LISTENING COMPREHENSION ACHIEVEMENT

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.
Keywords: Duolingo Application, Students’ Motivation, Listening Comprehension
Achievement.