The Effectiveness of Using British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Podcasts as a Media in Teaching English Listening Comprehension of 8th-Grade Students in Junior High School

Listening comprehension remains challenging for junior high school learners of English because classroom exposure to authentic spoken language is often limited. Recent studies support podcast-based listening, but empirical evidence focusing specifically on British Broadcasting Corporation podcasts in small junior high school classes and using a single-group design remains limited. This study examined students’ listening performance before and after podcast-based instruction and assessed the magnitude of improvement. A quantitative pre-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design involved 19 eighth-grade students at MTs Miftahurridho Sembir, Wonosobo. A 20-item multiple-choice listening test was administered before and after instruction using selected British Broadcasting Corporation Learning English podcast materials. Data were analyzed through descriptive statistics, the Shapiro-Wilk test, a paired-samples t test, and normalized gain. The mean score increased from 56.11 to 81.89, with a statistically significant paired difference, t(18) = 28.545, p < .001. The mean normalized gain was 0.6144, or 61.44%, indicating moderate improvement. The study’s novelty lies in examining contemporary authentic broadcast content in an underrepresented eighth-grade context. Given the absence of a control group, the findings demonstrate within-group improvement rather than causal superiority over other listening media.