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According to Depdiknas 2006: 34 the indicators of the listening competence of the eighth year students of Junior High School are as follows: 1
the students are able to identify the information or meaning which contained in the descriptive and recount text; and 2 The students are able to identify
functional and rhetorical steps of the descriptive and recount text. Based on the previous theories and the indicators of listening competence
of the eighth grade of junior high school, the writer concludes that listening comprehension is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying.
This process involves some aspects: 1 finding meaning of the words and phrases 2 finding main idea; 3 finding specific information; and 4
identifying the communicative purpose of text. The indicators of the students’
listening ability in this research are as follows: the students are able to 1 find the meaning of the words and phrases; 2 find main idea; 3 find specific
information; and 4 identify the communicative purpose of the descriptive and recount text.
4. Factors Affecting Listening Comprehension
Tarigan In Vasiljevic: 2010 identifies three factors that affect the
effectiveness and the quality of listening comprehension, they are as follows:
First is physical factor. Physical condition a person has plays an important role in listening. The defects in hearing, illness, hunger, etc., can
affect listening effectiveness and quality since they can decrease the concentration of a person in listening activity. Physical condition of the
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environment can also affect the success of listening. For instance, the weather which is too hot, too humid, or too cold, the room or place which smells bed,
noises from outside and inside the room will result in ineffective listening. Second is psychological factor. Psychologically listening is also
determined by positive factors effectiveness such as feeling of sympathy toward the speaker or the topic being discussed, good attitude toward the speaker, etc.,
that will cause the listener to pay attention to what is listened to. It is also affected by negative factors such as bad attitude or bad impression toward the
speaker, boring atmosphere, etc., that will make the listener not concentrate to what is being spoken.
The last is experiential factor. Experience plays a very important role in listening. Experience here may cover linguistic knowledge and the knowledge of
the world. A listener may get more difficulties in listening when he finds too many unknown words or too many complex structures beyond his mind. On the
other hand, background knowledge will also determine the success or the failure in listening.
In teaching English listening in class, the teacher, should consider the factors above in order that she can get the best condition of the students in
learning listening. For example, when the teacher knows that most of her students are tired, or may be bored with the material and it seems useless to go
on, the teacher can use jokes, etc.
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5. The Factors Making Listening Difficult
