The Effectiveness of Youtube on Elementary School Students ’ Reading Skills During the Covid-19 Pandemic – Narwastu

The goal of this study was to examine how effective YouTube was as a learning medium during pandemic Covid19 at SDN Bluru Kidul II Sidoarjo. The researchers used a quantitative study, specifically the descriptive design, to assess the effect of YouTube as a learning tool used during pandemic Covid-19 on the reading skills of students at SDN Bluru Kidul II Sidoarjo in the academic year 2020/2021. Thirty students from class 6-A in the sixth grade were chosen as purposive samples, with 15 students serving as the experimental group and 15 serving as the control group. Tests were given both before and after the treatment during this experiment. The results demonstrated that there are no statistically significant differences between the experimental and control groups in the pre-test, as the indicator level is (0.723), which is greater than 0.05 and statistically insignificant. Then, in the post-test, there are statistically significant differences between the experimental group and the control group, with the value of the indication level being (0.004), for mean scores of YouTube effectiveness in the experimental group with an average of 8.26 and 7.65 in the control group. The difference in mean scores between groups was statistically significant (t-value = 2.776, p-value =.004). According to the study's findings, the level of efficacy of using YouTube as a teaching tool to increase students' reading skills was extremely high.


INTRODUCTION
The development of education nowadays cannot be isolated from the development of science and technology, owing to the fact that the education required always moves in sync with global technological advancement. In terms of education, it was demanded that teaching and learning in the classroom be inventive and creative (Brown H. D., 2007). In this particular instance, students' reading skills, particularly in English lessons, are quite low in today's classroom. There is no doubt that technology improves at a quick pace nowadays, yet it is still falling short in terms of strengthening students' reading skills (Ahmadi, 2018).
Integration of technology into the curriculum or program is becoming more common in schools, offices, and among individuals because it supports learning and aids in the development of knowledge. Technology integration is the use of technology to enhance, reiterate, present, and assess how students understand the syllabus or the program (Widodo & Slamet, 2022). Using videos in the classroom is not a new concept regarding a unique cycle of adoption has taken place in the classroom with regard to video as a change tool over time. Students' creativity and teamwork are boosted by video-based tools (Mendoza, Caranto, & David, 2015). Students who have access to video can be more motivated and can benefit from a more distinctive environment for their learning experience. Video is a learning tool in and of itself, and when used correctly, it may provide significant benefits. It also serves as a medium for collaboration as well as a language in and of itself that has worldwide appeal (Greenberg, Barnett, & Nicholls, 2007).
Reading is one of the four abilities that must be acquired in addition to listening, speaking, and writing, and it is also the most difficult to master. Students' speaking, listening, and writing abilities are improved through reading, and reading is a crucial aspect of language acquisition since it helps to strengthen the skills acquired through hearing, speaking, and writing in the first place (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2010). The ability to read has an impact on the process of developing other skills (Brown H. D., 2007). Furthermore, as the learners, students must be able to exhibit reading competency, as required by the Indonesian national curriculum.
When it comes to reading, it is a lifelong ability that can be applied both in school and in everyday life. Reading is considered a fundamental life skill and it is the substance for a child's success in school and, more importantly (Anderson, 1991). Despite its importance, reading is one of the most difficult subjects to master in the educational system today. Whenever we deal with reading, we come up against two layers of reality: one that we can see and one that we cannot see. As a result, the objective of reading is to make the invisible layer, or the underlying message, apparent and understandable) All readers, according to Teele, should strive to comprehend what they are reading (Teele, 2004). Good readers, according to research, are actively engaged with the text and are conscious of the procedures they employ to comprehend what they are reading and comprehending. Using reading strategies, teachers can assist students in improving their comprehension skills. Researchers have discovered ways to boost reading comprehension, including prediction, finding connections, visualizing, inferring, questioning, and summarizing (Block & Israel, 2005).
Problems with reading are more likely to occur at the beginning of reading instruction, to continue, and to become more severe with time (Graney, 2000). Moreover, most schools do not identify fluency or comprehension deficits until the second or third grade since the reading abilities that are taught until the fourth grade are phonemic and not based on fluency and comprehension (McCardle, Scarborough, & Catts, 2001). According to study, when students reach high school age, their fluency does not improve, but their comprehension does (Calhoon, 2005).
During pandemic Covid-19, preliminary research was conducted toward the conditions of the 6 th grade students of SDN Bluru Kidul II Sidoarjo in the academic year 2020/2021, who served as the study's subjects. It was discovered that most of the students were struggling to understand the information from reading texts due to a lack of vocabulary among the students, the lack of students' opportunity to express their opinions during the teaching-learning activity, and the students' unwillingness to share the main idea from the reading text. Because of the issues outlined above, which leave students unapproachable, a level of minimum completeness, known as KKM (Kriteria Ketuntasan Minimal), has been established in the education curriculum (KKM > 70 for the English subject). The majority of the students received KKM scores in the lower range. As a result, if the problems continue to occur, it is unlikely that the educational objectives will be met. Consequently, the English teacher should seek to identify and resolve the issues that students are having with comprehending the substance of the text. Additionally, after conducting interviews with the teacher and students, the researchers discovered that students rarely engaged in reading practices. In their reading practices, the teacher merely asked students to read a text without any accompanying tasks to ensure that they understood what they were reading. A few examples of texts that were commonly supplied via Power Point (PPT) were only briefly examined by the teacher during an online classroom conducted via Google Meet or Zoom. When Covid-19 was widespread, the specified protocols were not well-applied in the online classroom, which contributed to the outbreak. The outcome was a lack of enthusiasm among students for the educational process, particularly for reading exercises.
Given the foregoing, the researchers concluded that an English teacher must apply an appropriate strategy to spark students' interest in reading activities and to make the teaching-learning process more enjoyable for all students involved (Widodo & Slamet, 2021). To make reading class more effective, interesting, and fun for the students, it is essential to teach in a way that is effective, engaging, and enjoyable for them (Slamet & Sulistyaningsih, 2021). Teachers should employ proper approaches for instructing students in reading, particularly during the Pandemic Covid-19 era's implementation of online learning environments (Widodo & Slamet, 2020). The teacher can make the reading process more fun and accessible to students by implementing the most appropriate method for each individual (Fatimah, Elzamzami, & Slamet, 2020).
The purpose of reading in high school, according to the primary school curriculum, is to comprehend the material. To obtain information, readers must comprehend the content. Most patterns found in primary level relate to students' issues analyzing and comprehending texts. According to Pan & Wu (2013), traditional methods of teaching reading comprehension are still heavily used in EFL classrooms. Large presentations employ centered teaching to encourage reading. The reading course includes text explanation, vocabulary illustration, grammar teaching, and intense drills on language forms (Sabat & Slamet, 2019). Teachers who control language learning and produce passive learners instead of helping students become more autonomous learners make EFL lessons boring and pointless for students (Rachmadtullah, et al., 2020). Using an online learning platform, educators can fulfill the demands of the 21 st century (Widodo & Slamet, 2022).
According to technology or learning platforms that have advanced in recent years, YouTube is one of the platforms that can be used in reading instruction because it has a large number of videos available, particularly in an educational setting. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by three former PayPal workers (Jefferson, 2005). Using this video-sharing service, you can effortlessly upload, share and view videos with your friends and family. It becomes the primary source of online video content (Burk & Snyder, 2008). As YouTube's user base has grown, Google executives saw an opportunity to acquire the site (La Monica, 2006). Many people find YouTube to be a very appealing social media platform (Bonk, 2009), as it contains hundreds of videos ranging from entertainment to education, politics, health care, history and so forth. Since YouTube website is a free-of-charge it makes it easy for learners and teachers to watch and upload videos. Teachers from around the world have created their own channels on YouTube and regularly uploaded different educational videos that many students find it beneficial.
In light of the aforementioned goals and circumstances, it is imperative that the teacher of the reading class make every effort to turn around some of these negative outcomes. As a result, the suggests strategies using YouTube as a teaching tool for reading and comprehension. YouTube was chosen as a teaching and learning tool because of its many benefits. Previous research on YouTube's educational influence have been undertaken. First, the teacher uses YouTube as a media to tackle this problem because it has a large amount of video content  (Khalid, 2012). In addition to stimulating the visual and auditory channels of working memory in the brain, watching YouTube videos can also increase the long-term memory content (Berk, 2009). An examination of the use of YouTube as a teaching tool to increase students' reading comprehension is too narrow. As a result, researchers focused on the effectiveness of YouTube as a primarylevel learning tool during the pandemic Covid-19 through this research.

METHODOLOGY
The researchers employed quantitative research, specifically the descriptive design, to investigate the effectiveness of YouTube as a learning tool used during pandemic Covid-19 on the students' reading skills at SDN Bluru Kidul II Sidoarjo. For this study, which took place at SDN Bluru Kidul II Sidoarjo in the academic year 2020/2021, 30 students from the 6th grade of class 6-A were chosen as purposive samples which were divided into 15 students as experimental group and 15 students as the control group. During this investigation, a test was administered both before and after the treatment. To determine their background knowledge of the target terms, all participants in the study were required to take a reading pre-test.
In an online class held via the Google Meet platform a week after the students completed their pre-test, the teacher introduced the topic and new vocabulary to the students, using a PowerPoint presentation provided to them by the researchers and delivered to them via the Google Meet platform. After this was completed, students in the experimental group classes were divided into groups and informed that they would be watching a two-minute YouTube video, with the content of the film is quickly explained to them before they began watching. Just before seeing the video, the teachers were invited to put on the board one or two basic questions connected to the video that they wanted to discuss afterward. It was then decided how long they would have to spend discussing their responses with their group members once they had completed watching the video. After that, one person from each group was requested to submit the responses in either Bahasa Indonesia or English, depending on their ability. They were instructed to encourage the students to utilize the new vocabulary they had learned in the classroom setting. After this was accomplished, the teacher was instructed to play the video again, this time attempting to bring the students' attention to the new vocabulary, its application, and knowledge of the topic. In order to underline the new definitions, they were instructed to pause and replay the clip several times. The final exercise was a reading worksheet assignment, which was completed by students in pairs. A post-test was delivered to the students in both groups two weeks after the treatment to see how much of the target material they were able to retain in their reading skills.
When a valid test is administered, the item being tested matches what the test was designed to assess. Both the pre and post-tests were developed and validated by a panel of raters consisting of two validators from the curriculum and test experts. The tests approach was employed by the researchers to ensure the reliability of the test. To determine reliability value, a similar pre-test was administered to a pilot sample of 30 students who were subsequently included in the study. The Pearson coefficient was used to calculate the reliability value. Furthermore, the researchers employed the same procedure of retesting to determine the dependability of the post-test results. The post-test was administered to a sample of 30 students, and the Pearson coefficient was used to obtain a reliability value of 0.865, indicating that both tests had a high level of reliability when used in the current study.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Here are the outcomes of the data collection efforts that were undertaken in order to answer the problem statement. This information has been interpreted in light of the study's aim. An independent sample t-test was used to determine whether or not there were any statistically significant differences between the pre-test scores of the students in the experimental group and those in the control group before the experiment began. The findings of this investigation are presented in the following table.  Table 1 shows that there are no statistically significant differences between the experimental and control groups in the pre-test, as the value of the indication level is (0.723), which is bigger than 0.05 and statistically insignificant.
An after-experiment test was administered to the two groups of participants in this study to assess their reading skills performance after the experiment was completed. The findings of the post-test scores were analyzed, and the results are displayed in Table 2 below.

Table 2 The T-Value of the Difference in the Mean Scores on Post-test N Mean SD t-value p-value
The effectiveness of YouTube  Table 2 shows that there are statistically significant differences between the experimental group and the control group in the post-test, with the value of the indication level being (0.004), for mean scores of the effectiveness of YouTube in the students in the experimental group with an average of 8.26 and 7.65 for the students in the control group. The difference between the mean scores between the two groups was statistically significant (t-value = 2.776, p-value = .004). In the study's findings, it was discovered that the level of efficacy of using YouTube as a learning resource to improve students' reading skills was extremely high.
The utilization of YouTube-based videos in the online classroom to teach reading to 6 th grade students at SDN Bluru Kidul II Sidoarjo in the academic year 2020/2021 was intended to keep the students engaged and not bored throughout the lengthy Covid-19 online class. Student collaboration on tasks is encouraged, and the supported point encourages students to participate actively in the online class is also encouraged. Additionally, YouTube-based videos assisted the learner in learning about reading in terms of the manner in which it is done (fluency), grasping new vocabularies that are discovered, and the content of what has to be comprehended. Following their watching of the video, the students get an understanding of what it means to read and comprehend. Furthermore, conversing with their group provides each student with the opportunity to give and share information orally with the other members of the group. The students are performing intensive and substantial reading performances unintentionally throughout this time period, according to the teacher.
The findings of the current study demonstrate that students found YouTube to be beneficial in their learning as well as useful in improving their reading skills. There have been various studies to confirm this, including one by Koksal, who explains that the potential of students to recall words through videos by saying that the students form auditory, visual, as well as mental linkages when watching video clips that are new to their memory (Köksal, 2004). As a second language learner, Lin believes that watching videos can be an effective tool for helping students learn and retain vocabulary (Lin, 2010). Adding to this, Koksal asserts that incorporating video clips into the classroom saves time because it usually helps to focus the students' attention while at the same time engaging them in what is being delivered by the teacher (Köksal, 2004). Additionally, according to the findings of the study, the usage of YouTube videos in the classroom boosted students' participation in the teaching and learning process. Besides that, some researches go so far as to claim that people in general, and students in particular, respond more positively to video formats than to other forms, which, in turn, encourages students to participate more actively in their learning process (Ghasemi,Hashemi,& Bardine,3845 2011). Alwehaibi discovered that incorporating YouTube into the learning process resulted in students being highly motivated to watch, read, write, discuss, communicate, and participate in the many activities throughout the learning process [28].

CONCLUSION
In light of the findings of the study and a review of previous literature, it can be concluded that teachers should be encouraged to use technology into their classroom instruction. To begin, it should be noted that there are no statistically significant differences between the experimental and control groups in the pre-test, as evidenced by the value of the indication level, which is (0.723), which is greater than 0.05 but statistically insignificant. On the other hand, in the post-test, there are statistically significant differences between students in the experimental and control groups, with a value of the indication level of (0.004) for mean scores on the effectiveness of YouTube among those in the experimental group, with an average of 8.26 and 7.65 for those in the control group. In this study, there was a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the two groups (t-value = 2.776, p-value =.004). According to the study's findings, using YouTube as a learning resource to increase students' reading skills has an incredibly high level of efficacy in terms of improving student reading skills.
Despite this, the researcher believes that additional research should be carried out with a bigger sample of participants. Additionally, it is proposed that, in order to further confirm this study, control and experimental groups in other English skills be included as a feasible inclusion. Furthermore, a follow-up study on the perspectives of different English proficiency levels on the usefulness of YouTube as a learning media in either an online or an offline classroom setting should be undertaken.