LISTENING

LISTENING

Language learning depends on listening. Listening provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication.

Effective language instructors show students how they can adjust their listening behavior to deal with a variety of situations, types of input, and listening purposes. They help students develop a set of listening strategies and match appropriate strategies to each listening situation.

Listening is one of the basic skills in language learning. Listening is the skill that most frequent used by every human. Listening is different with hearing. Caspersz and Stasinsca (2015: 1) reported in their journal that Low and Sonntag (2013) say “Listening is not the same as hearing. While hearing is a physiological process, listening is a conscious process that requires us to be mentally attentive.”

Nor reported in her journal that listening is the first step for the students when they want to understand language particularly English. It is receptive skill and very important skill in foreign language classrooms because it provides input for the learners; by listening the students can produce language such as speaking and writing by vocabulary that they obtain from listening. For most people, being able to claim knowledge of a foreign language means being able to speak and listen in that language (Richard & Renandya, 2002).

Listening Strategies

Listening strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of listening input. Listening strategies can be classified by how the listener processes the input.

In 'real-life' listening, our students will have to use a combination of the two processes, with more emphasis on 'top-down' or 'bottom-up' listening depending on their reasons for listening.

Top-down strategies are listener based; the listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language. This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next. Top-down strategies include

• listening for the main idea
• predicting
• drawing inferences
• summarizing

Bottom-up strategies are text based; the listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning. Bottom-up strategies include

• listening for specific details
• recognizing cognates
• recognizing word-order patterns

Strategic listeners also use metacognitive strategies to plan, monitor, and evaluate their listening.

• They plan by deciding which listening strategies will serve best in a particular situation.
• They monitor their comprehension and the effectiveness of the selected strategies.
• They evaluate by determining whether they have achieved their listening comprehension goals and whether the combination of listening strategies selected was an effective one.

Listening for Meaning

To extract meaning from a listening text, students need to follow four basic steps:

• Figure out the purpose for listening. Activate background knowledge of the topic in order to predict or anticipate content and identify appropriate listening strategies.
• Attend to the parts of the listening input that are relevant to the identified purpose and ignore the rest. This selectivity enables students to focus on specific items in the input and reduces the amount of information they have to hold in short-term memory in order to recognize it.
• Select top-down and bottom-up strategies that are appropriate to the listening task and use them flexibly and interactively. Students' comprehension improves and their confidence increases when they use top-down and bottom-up strategies simultaneously to construct meaning.
• Check comprehension while listening and when the listening task is over. Monitoring comprehension helps students detect inconsistencies and comprehension failures, directing them to use alternate strategies.

Listening Techniques

In Nor’s Research, she said that there are many kinds of technique that can be used in teaching of listening. They are:

1.      Information Transfer.

 To apply this technique, the English teacher used 6 pictures as a media. 

2.      Paraphrasing and Translating.

This technique included in post listening activities where students rewrite the listening texts in different words using their own words. Then teacher asked students to read their writing and checked weather was suitable or not to the dialogue they had listened.

3.      Answering Questions.

This technique included in post listening activities where students answer some questions based on the dialogues they had listened from the cassette and then corrected together in class to know the right answer.

4.      Summarizing.

This technique included in post listening activities where students were given several possible summary sentences and asked to say which of them fit a recorded text. In other words, teacher asked the students retell the dialogue based on their own words after they listened to the dialogue on the cassette.

5.      Filling in Blanks.

This technique included in while listening activities where students were given the transcript of a passage or a dialogue with some words missing and must fill in the blanks while listening.

6.      Answering to Show Comprehension of Messages.

This technique included in post listening activities where teacher asked the students to give tick or cross to indicate which was the correct answer from the four choices (A, B, C, D) for the questions about monologues they had listened from the cassette. There were many questions that should be answered by the students.

REFERENCES

Anvar, N. 2016. Teaching Listening Comprehension: Bottom-Up Approach. International Journal of Environmental and Science Education. 11, 8.

Atallah, D & Kadhim, H. 2010. The Effect of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processing on Developing EFL Students’ Listening Comprehension. Journal of Al-Fatih. 1, 15-22.

Kalantarian, S.R. 2016. The Effect of Strategy-Based Instruction on EFL Learners’ Listening Performance. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Language Research. 3, 12-23.

Nor, H. 2014. The Techniques In Teaching Listening Skill. Journal on English as a Foreign Language. 4, 41.

Pourhosein, Abbas. 2016. Learner’s Listening Comperhension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review. Journal of English Language Teaching. 9, 123.