Qowaid Nahwu dalam Irama: Strategi Bernyanyi Untuk Meningkatkan Pemahaman Siswa Kelas IX di Pondok Pesantren Hubulo

Abstract

The teaching of qawāʿid nahwu in Islamic boarding school settings presents persistent pedagogical challenges, as the subject's abstract conceptual framework and reliance on rote memorisation have been consistently associated with low learner engagement and insufficient depth of grammatical comprehension among students. This study aimed to investigate the effect of a singing strategy  a systematically designed instructional intervention that embeds qawāʿid nahwu rules within rhythmically and lyrically structured songs explicitly aligned with the pesantren curriculum  on the comprehension of ninth-grade students at Hubulo Islamic Boarding School. A quantitative quasi-experimental design with a Nonequivalent Control Group pretest–posttest framework was employed, with participants assigned to an experimental group receiving singing-based instruction and a control group receiving conventional teacher-centred methods. Qawāʿid nahwu comprehension was measured through a validated and reliability-tested written instrument assessing students' ability to identify grammatical functions, determine i'rāb, and apply Nahwu rules in sentential contexts; data were analysed using descriptive statistics, normality and homogeneity assumption tests, and an independent samples t-test via SPSS software. The results demonstrated that the experimental group achieved a mean posttest score of 82.30 compared to 71.25 in the control group, with the between-group difference confirmed as statistically significant (Sig. = 0.000, p < 0.05) and the effect size quantified at Cohen's d = 1.94  a very large effect indicating educationally substantial improvement. Complementary observational data further revealed that the singing strategy fostered markedly higher levels of active participation, sustained attention, and learning enthusiasm among experimental group students. These findings establish the singing strategy as a statistically effective, practically meaningful, and culturally appropriate instructional approach for qawāʿid nahwu in pesantren contexts, extending prior local scholarship beyond vocabulary-focused and descriptive accounts to provide the first controlled experimental evidence of singing's effectiveness in classical Arabic grammatical comprehension.