Listening is substantial quantities of interesting comprehensible receptive activity Nation and Macalister, 2010:39. In a curriculum design, content and
sequencing deals with what goes into a language course and the order in which language items appear in the course. So, materials in teaching listening run a
language course which is full of interesting activities and which introduces the learners to new language items, but which provides a very poor return for the time
invested in it. In conclusion, people use listening to understand the spoken discourse. They
maintain social interaction by adsorbing the meaning before they speak. Building a map of meaning in the mind consists of paralinguistic behavior to lack
misunderstanding in understanding the spoken language.
2. Principles of Listening
Based on the type of listening processes which are bottom-up and top-down, there are two principles for teaching listening:
a. Expose students to different ways of processing information: bottom up
vs. top-down.
In bottom-up, learners focus on the linguistics features such as vocabulary, grammatical and phonological competence. With bottom-up, students start with
the component parts: words, grammar and the like Nunan, 2003: 26. In this case, learners learn some linguistic competence in order to construct the meaning.
1 Vocabulary competence The roles of vocabulary in understanding lexical items of learning listening
are based on the form and meaning. The form can be word classes and word formation. Word classes have two types which are grammatical words and content
words. The grammatical words are generally prepositions, conjunctions, determiners and pronouns. On the other hand, the content words are usually
nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs Thornburry, 2002: 4. These are the single word which has a role as a key word before giving the main activities in teaching
listening. Word formation called compounding system is the combining two or more independent words, as in the case of second-hand, word processor,
paperback, and so on Thornburry, 2002: 8. It gives the learners information
about the complexity of words. In this case, learners get the knowledge of these words after giving the main activities in teaching listening.
Giving the knowledge of vocabulary items means transferring information about the meaning. It gives the learners take an action in the mind to build some
contextual perceptions to understand the meaning. 2 Grammatical Competence
In understanding spoken discourse, the grammatical competence is very important for learners to differentiate between spoken grammar and written
grammar. The spoken is simpler to understand rather than the written Thornburry, 2002: 8. It is an evident that spoken grammar is different from
written grammar. It gives the learner information about the function of grammar
both formal and informal. In addition, the spoken grammar can be integrated with contextual meaning to understand functions of spoken discourse.
3 Phonological Competence Learning spoken discourse is learning how people speak with some
paralinguistic behaviors. Phonological competence concerns on the pronunciation of the speakers. Good pronunciation can be improved through authentic spoken
materials Kelly, 2000: 8. By listening, learners find out how to pronounce the words correctly. There are several activities related to phonological competence in
doing listening such as pronunciation, word stresses, intonations, and sounds. The materials of bottom-up process are based on the grammatical competence
of the students. Comprehension begins with the received data that is analyzed as successive levels of organization
– sounds, words, clauses, sentences, texts – until meaning is derived Richards, 2008: 4. The input is scanned for familiar words,
and grammatical knowledge is used to work out the relationship between elements of sentences. Clark and Clark in Richards, 2008: 4 summarize this view of
listening in the following way: a [Listeners] take in raw speech and hold a phonological representation of it in
working memory. b They immediately attempt to organize the phonological representation into
constituents, identifying their content and function. c They identify each constituent and then construct underlying propositions,
building continually onto a hierarchical representation of propositions.
d 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 top-down process, it refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message Richards, 2008: 5. Whereas bottom-up
processing goes from language to meaning, top-down processing goes from meaning to language. The background knowledge required for top-down
processing may be prior knowledge about the topic of discourse, situational or contextual knowledge, or knowledge in the form of schema. Schema are abstract
notions we process based on experience Nunan, 2003: 26. Therefore, learners can identify the meaning from the materials by using their prior knowledge.
Both bottom-up and top-down can integrate together in teaching listening. The integration of top-down and bottom-up are called interactive processing
Nunan, 2003: 29. In learning listening, learners base their information on their knowledge of life using top-down information as they generate vocabulary and
sentences using bottom-up data. In integrating the processes, listening consists of several indicators which are finding the main idea of the paragraph or passage,
finding the topic of the paragraph or passage, identifying the main point or important information, deducing the meaning of unfamiliar lexical items, and
making inferences Harmer, 2001:201. Those indicators can be referenced as the tests. Bottom-up consists of vocabulary, grammatical and phonological
competence, but top-down consists of several indicators which can be combined by bottom-up process.
Table 1. The Framework of Listening Comprehension
Cognitive level Indicators
Vocabulary Competence
Grammatical Competence
Comprehension Total
1.Finding the main idea of the spoken
discourse 1,4, 10, 20, 21,
22, 28, 31, 8
2.Finding the topic of
the spoken
discourse 5,7, 8, 17,
18, 19, 33, 34
8
3.Identifying the
main point
or important
information 6, 9, 11, 12,
13, 14, 37, 38
8
4.Deducing the
meaning of
unfamiliar lexical items
2,3,15, 16, 23, 32,36,
39 8
5.Making inferences 24, 25, 26, 27,
29, 30, 35, 40 8
Total 40
Adapted from Harmer in Practical English Language Teaching 2001
The table above shows the framework of the tests to represent the competence of students‟ listening skills.
b. Expose students to different types of listening.
