Seven Principles of Tasks Development based on Task-Based Language

2 The Sequence of Listening Activity According to Wilson 2008 there are three stages of listening activities. It is described as follows. a Pre-listening: This stage involves in doing preparation for the students before they do the listening activities. If the students have an idea of what they are going to listen, this gives a better result for them when they do the tasks given. In the first stage of pre- listening activities, students are usually lead to activate their schemata. This activities help a lot in predicting the content of the materials that they hear. Then, the second stage is setting up the reason to listen. They have to understand why they have to listen or for what reason they have to do this listening activities. b While-listening: This stage includes the listening activities and the tasks that the students should carry on. The teacher can control how many times the tape is played. It is according to the type of tasks that the students have to accomplish. It can be just listening for gist, listening to search for detailed information, and so on. There are other factors which can be taken into consideration on how many times the teacher want to play the tape. Those are the level of difficulty, the length of the passage, the pedagogical focus, and the potential for boredom. c Post-listening: There are several activities that can be done in this stage of listening activities. Students can check their answers, looking for the difficult vocabularies, giving response to the content of the listening materials, discussing about the grammatical structure used in the passage, and so forth. They can do it orally or write in down in their notebook. These kinds of activities can be done with the whole class or even in a group. The teacher also usually gives the students feedback to improve their skill and knowledge in the end of the listening activities. 3 Principles of Listening Material Development To develop good listening materials, there are several things that should be considered by the task maker. Celce and Murcia 2001 state that there are three principles of listening materials development. First is relevance. Both of the content of the listening materials and the outcome must be as relevant as possible to the learners. It helps to increase students’ attention. The more relevant the materials to the students’ real life, the more materials go to students. It leads them have high motivation in having listening activities. There are so many published books which offer materials for listening activities. However, tasks developers should choose carefully which materials that close to the students’ real life. Tasks developers should not just adopt but also adapt the materials according to the students’ needs. The second principle is transferability or applicability. Materials which are relevant also seems to have potential for transferability. So, the students are not only listen to the inputs, but also able to get the knowledge of the content given. Good listening materials should contain something that is applicable to the real life internally and externally. Applicable internally means that it can be used in other classes. On the other hand, applicable externally means that it can also be used out of school situation. TV news broadcast is one example of applicable material. Not only that it is categorized as real life listening comprehension, but it also contains applicable materials. The third principle is task orientation. There are two different kinds of focuses in the formal language learning classes. These are language use tasks and language analysis tasks. Combining both of them makes the learning process more productive. Language use tasks have the purpose to provide the students with information and then ask them to do something with it. There are some specific tasks that can be done such as listening and performing activities, problem solving, performing operations, transcribing, summarizing information heard, and interactive listening and negotiating of meaning through questioning and answering routines. There are advantages that can be achieved through listening activities which focus on language use tasks. It can develop vocabularies and build repertoire of background knowledge. As results, it can increase predictive power including schemata and scripts that allows students to predict actors, events, action sequences, and alternative outcomes. It may be beneficial for the students when they hold a communication in the future. Meanwhile language analysis tasks have the purpose to analyze selected aspects for both language structure and language use. It can also develop some personal strate gies to facilitate students’ learning and help them become knowledgeable about how language works.