<![CDATA[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.]]>
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