Using Animation Clips to Improve the Listening Ability of the Tenth Grade Students Majoring in Animation Atik Ulinuha Universitas Negeri Malang, atikulinuha@gmail.com ABSTRACT A classroom action research was conducted to address the problems in listening faced by tenth grade students from Animation department in a vocational high school in Malang. Listening is a receptive skill which is needed to support students’ productive skills, speaking and writing. However, in this vocational high school, tenth graders mostly face difficulty in listening skill because of the time limitation and the fact that listening is a new thing for them. Especially in animation department, most of the students are visual learners who feel it hard to listen without having body language or other clues. Reflecting upon the problem found in the preliminary research, this study to improve students’ listening ability through animation clips was conducted in a collaborative classroom action research. Referring to Dale’s Cone of Experience, animation clips is believed to be able to help them due to the applicable visuals in it. Through well-prepared media and procedures, the results does not only show that animation clips could improve students from animation department listening ability but also show that the students gave a good response toward the employment of animation clips. Key Words: listening ability, Animation Clips, vocational high school. 1. Introduction The students in this classroom action research showed poor listening ability and low scores in their listening. The students’ listening scores in the preliminary study proves the statement before since from 33 participants, only ten students got mark above the minimum standard set by the school. Various reasons have been stated about why students feel that listening is difficult. The first reason is that the fact that they were still in the tenth grade. Listening activity can be considered as new thing for them since not all of them got the listening materials before in their junior high schools. In short, it happens because English is not their first language, so they have to deal with a lot of difficult input, such as speakers’ expression, volume and speed in speaking, diction, and the culture background that is inside the listening material (Sumiarsih, 2011:3). Time limitation also becomes one of the problems. Because of the changing of curriculum from curriculum 2006 to curriculum 2013, the students only have a meeting (2 x 45 minutes) for English subject in a week which is clearly hard to cover all skills at once especially listening skill which needs to be well prepared and lot of practice. In addition, it is the nature of Animation department students that they are visual learner. Thus having no visual to support their learning process will be hard for them. Audio-visual media like animation clips can be a good media to help students to improve their listening ability. According to Dale’s Cone of Experience (cited in Bilash, 2009), in passive learning, students tend to remember only 20 percent of what they hear while they will remember 50 percent of what they see. Therefore, it is good to use audio visual media, which is media that can be seen and listened, to introduce listening activity to the students. Here, animation clips used as an alternative medium in listening activity to help