The Role of Youtube in Boosting Students’ Speaking Skill

Exanty Safiera Secioria Asjhari and Rochmatul Hasanah

akuexa22@gmail.com and annalluuffy@gmail.com

Speaking English is the vital communication skill to express and exchange information,
ideas, feelings, and thoughts with the global societies since English is a lingua franca.
However, the EFL students have some obstacles, which make them afraid to practice
speaking in English. The common internal issues are EFL students not confident with their
grammar, pronunciation, accent, and vocabularies. Furthermore, the environment and the
teaching method used in the teaching learning process trigger the EFL students feeling
reluctant to practice their speaking skill. In this paper, we are going to emphasize the role of
Youtube in drilling students’ speaking skill, which can help them in increasing their
confidence in speaking English. The participants of this study were 30 students from the
ninth grade students of At-Thohiriyah Islamic Junior High School. In this study, the
participants are asked to create vlogs (video blog) in Youtube as their homework. As the
result of this study, it showed that the use of Youtube does improve students' speaking skill.
Since Youtube gives opportunity for EFL students to speak in public without experiencing
nervosity, it is a great way to build students' confidence in speaking. Youtube is choosen in
this study because it is easy, common, free, popular, and todays generations seem like to
spend their time surfing on the internet, which means that this is as a great opportunity to
bring it into the English speaking learning process. Therefore, students might assume that
speaking is not something difficult, but easy and fun.
Keywords: Youtube, vlog, speaking, confidence, students’ interest.