Pop Culture Activity and Interview Speaking Perfoemance among Sixth-Semester English Education Student: Aktivitas Budaya Populer dan Performa Berbicara dalam Wawancara pada Mahasiswa Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris Semester VI

This study examined the relationship between students’ pop culture activity and interview speaking performance among sixth-semester students in the English Education Program at Merangin University. A quantitative correlational design was used with total sampling of 22 students during the 2025/2026 academic year. Pop culture activity was measured with a 57-item questionnaire adapted from Acharya’s framework. Speaking performance was represented by recorded interview assignments from a Public Speaking course and assessed by two raters using five rubric dimensions: pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, fluency, and comprehension. The reported descriptive statistics were M = 210.68 (SD = 27.13) for pop culture activity and M = 80.09 (SD = 13.29) for speaking performance. Pearson product-moment correlation yielded r = .344, p = .117 (two-tailed), indicating a positive but statistically non-significant association in this cohort. The result does not establish that popular culture has no value for English learning; rather, it shows that the broad activity score used in this study was not significantly associated with performance on the interview task. The interpretation is limited by the small, single-cohort sample and by the absence of reported psychometric evidence for the adapted questionnaire and inter-rater reliability for the speaking scores. The findings support more cautious measurement of popular culture activity and further research that distinguishes receptive exposure from productive English use.