25 accent of the speaker. In authentic listening materials, the students may found it is
difficult to listen to different accents, even in one listening passage. Furthermore, the disadvantages dealt with the structure. In authentic
materials, sometimes too many structures are mixed so lower levels have a hard time decoding the texts. This disadvantage can be minimized by selecting
language contained in the authentic materials. The process of selecting the materials or special preparation may bring teachers to another disadvantage
namely time consuming. Culture biased also becomes one of the disadvantages of authentic
materials. Some authentic materials can be too culturally biased, in which sometimes make the students outside the language community difficult to
understand.
d. Materials Selection Criteria for Teaching
There are criteria in selecting the authentic materials for teaching listening. Goh 2002 summarized six criteria of general materials selection; there are
language, purpose, speaker, intended audience, length, and visual support.
1 Language
The language should be of a level that students are capable of understanding but the same time present some challenge for using listening skills
and strategies. It is better not to use difficult language for students no matter how interesting or relevant the topic is. Goh 2002 added, on the other hand, it is
better for the teacher not to overlook materials that may contain many new words. It is suggested for the teacher to consider the background knowledge of the
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26 students, so that the teacher can develop less demanding tasks such as those that
require students to listen for gist or to infer contents using top-down strategies.
2 Purpose
In this criterion, teacher should consider the aim and objectives of the lesson. The teacher should also decide what types of task and talk are appropriate
before selecting the material and the original communicative purpose of the materials. It is also important to match the lesson objectives and tasks accordingly.
3 Speaker
This criterion is related to the characteristics of speakers, which can have an important influence on the comprehension of the listeners. Some of the
characteristics included accent, speech rate, pronunciation, clarity if thought and even gender. Teacher should also consider the number of speakers involved and
limit them if necessary to increase the students‟ progress. In selecting the materials, teachers are supposed to avoid materials in which the speakers have
strong accents that the students will probably never encounter. At the same time, it is better to choose materials with normal speed and avoid speakers who speak too
fast, even by first language users‟ standards.
4 Intended Audience
Teachers are supposed to match the intended audience of the materials to the type of students. In addition, the content of the material should be comparable
to the intellectual and maturity level of the learners, and cultural and religious sensitivities.
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27
5 Length
The length of listening texts varies according to several factors, not only to the types of listening skill that are practised and the proficiency level of the
students.
B. Theoretical Framework
Listening is a passive language skill which involves a number of different ways in which the listeners can or fail to process incoming speech. There are four
major reasons why the listeners can or fail to process the incoming speech, according to Anderson 1988, namely: first, the listener may not hear adequately
what has been said due to unfamiliarity with th e speaker‟s accent and or
competing background noise. Second, the speech may contain words or phrases that the listeners can hear adequately but is unable to understand due to serious
problem with the syntax or semantic of the foreign language. Third, there are times when the listeners are perfectly able to hear and understand the speaker, but
may have „switched off‟ consciously or unconsciously. Fourth, there are messages which the listener attends to fully and from which he tried to construct coherence
interpretation. In this research, the listening comprehension problems occurred mainly
due to unfamiliarity with the speaker‟s accent, problem with syntax and semantics
of the foreign language. The unfamiliarity with the speaker‟s accent was due to no sufficient time to have listening comprehension practice in class.
Meanwhile, the problem with syntax or semantic of the foreign language deals with the vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. As Guo 2005 found in the
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