Assessing the situation: Taking stock of conditions surrounding a language task by as
sessing one‟s own knowledge, one‟s available internal and external resources, and the constraints of the situation
before engaging in a task. Monitoring: Determining the effectiveness of one‟s own or another‟s
performance while engaged in a task. Self-evaluating: Determining the effectiveness of one‟s own or
another‟s performance after engaging in the activity. Self-testing: Testing oneself to determine the effectiveness of one‟s
own language use or the lack thereof.
5. The Process of Listening
Nunan 1998:25 states that successful listeners use both bottom-up and top-down strategies. Richards 2008:4 classifies the process of listening into two.
a. The Bottom-Up Processing
Bottom-up processing refers to using the incoming input as the basis for understanding the message. Comprehension begins with the received data that is
analyzed as successive levels of organization sounds, words, clauses, sentences, texts until meaning is derived. Comprehension is viewed as a process of decoding.
The listene r‟s lexical and grammatical competence in a language provides the
basis for bottom-up processing. The input is scanned for familiar words, and grammatical knowledge is used to work out the relationship between elements
of sentences. perpustakaan.uns.ac.id
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Clark and Clark 1977:49 summarized this view of listening. 1.
Listeners take in raw speech and hold a phonological representation of it in working memory.
2. They immediately attempt to organize the phonological representation into
constituents, identifying their content and function. 3.
They identify each constituent and then construct underlying propositions, building continually onto a hierarchical representation of propositions.
4. Once they have identified the propositions for a constituent, they retain
them in working memory and at some point purge memory of the phonological representation. In doing this, they forget the exact wording
and retain the meaning. In the classroom, examples of the kinds of tasks that develop bottom-up listening
skills require listeners to do the kinds of things: 1.
Identify the referents of pronouns in an utterance 2.
Recognize the time reference of an utterance 3.
Distinguish between positive and negative statements 4.
Recognize the order in which words occurred in an utterance 5.
Identify sequence markers 6.
Identify key words that occurred in a spoken text 7.
Identify which modal verbs occurred in a spoken text perpustakaan.uns.ac.id
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b. Top-Down Processing
Top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message. It goes from meaning to
language. The background knowledge required for top-down processing may be previous knowledge about the topic of discourse, situational or contextual
knowledge, or knowledge in the for m of “schemata” or “scripts” plans about the
overall structure of events and the relationships between them. Exercises that require top-down processing devel
op the learner‟s ability to do:
1. Use key words to construct the schema of a discourse
2. Infer the setting for a text
3. Infer the role of the participants and their goals
4. Infer causes or effects
5. Infer unstated details of a situation
6. Anticipate questions related to the topic or situation
In real-world listening, both bottom-up and top-down processing generally occur together. The extent to which one or the other dominates depends
on the listener‟s familiarity with the topic and content of a text, the density of
information in a text, the text type, and the listener‟s purpose in listening.
6. The Difficulty in Listening Skill
