Title : Writing Instruction through Podcasts or
Traditional
Classrooms: That is the Question!
Writer and Institution : Fatemeh
Behjat, English Department, Islamic Azad University, Abadeh Branch,
Abadeh, Iran
The history
of language teaching has been shown in the delivery of instructional material,
those was from traditional face-to-face instruction to Web Based Instruction
(WBI). Podcasts is a variety of WBI
which can be in the form of natural English audios made by English
native speakers. Podcast is now commonly used to refer to a series of audio
recordings that can be distributed and accessed through the Internet (Guertin,
Bodek, Zappe, & Kim, 2007). The audios are created to facilitate creative
teaching material to students for
enhancing their enthusiasm and creativity in writing under the teacher’s
instruction . Hence, they can get some helpful bridging for creating a
qualified writing work.
This was an
experimental research that was conducted to examine the effectiveness of
writing instruction through podcasts. This research took 57 students from three
universities as the samples. They were then split into two classes,
experimental and control classes. The treatment in the experimental class was
teaching students writing through podcasts, whereas the control group was
taught by traditional instruction as commonly used by the teacher in teaching
writing. Both pretest and posttest were provided to the two groups as to
collect the data. The result of this research was analyzed through statistical
calculation as the rule of an experimental research analysis. The analysis
proved that writing instruction through podcasts was significantly more
effective in improving students’ writing ability.
Then, the
question is, How if I apply this “podcast” in Indonesia? I suggest that it will be
best applied in University level or Senior high level. Because of the
improvement of technology in Indonesia, the students have already gadget or
laptop and most of them have advanced skill in
using technology. But the obstacle is may be the
internet connection. We can overcome it by using free wifi in school or in
other areas that serve free connection, or even using our data connection.
.
