10 including “active listening”, which goes beyond comprehending literally to
empathetic understanding of the speaker.
b. Listening as Skills
According to Anderson 1988, listening, under many circumstances is a reciprocal skill. Also, listening skills are as important as speaking skills. It means
that people could not communicate face-to-face unless the two types of skill are developed in tandem. Moreover, people cannot practise listening in the same way
as they can rehearse speaking, or at least the part of speaking that had to do with pronunciation, because people cannot usually predict what they will have to listen
to. In addition, Anderson 1988 stated that all types of listening skills are
valuable and necessary if a learner‟s aim is to acquire an all-round ability to listen effectively in a range of situations, to various types of input, and for a variety of
listening purposes. In this research, listening skills are related to the type of purposeful listening, namely comprehensive listening. This type of purposeful
listening is to understand the message, and formed the foundation for listening therapeutically, critically, and appreciatively Wolvin Coakely, 1996. Briefly,
Wolvin Coakely 1996 defined comprehensive listening as informational listening, in which students listen for the content of the message.
c. Listening Processes
There are two distinct views of listening process, namely bottom-up processing and top-down processing. Buck 2001: 2 explained that the bottom-up
processing refers to a process of passing through a number of consecutive stages,
PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
11 or levels, and the output of each stage becomes the input for the next higher stage.
Bottom-up processing tends to rely on the text, in which the listeners rely on the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that created meaning. Another view
of listening process is top-down processing. Top-down processing emphasizes more the background knowledge of the listeners. Prior knowledge of a topic
enables listeners to interpret what they have heard and predict what will come next. Listening comprehension is mainly a top-down process in the sense that the
various types of knowledge involved in understanding language were applied in any order, or even simultaneously, and they are all capable of interacting and
influencing each other Buck, 2001: 3. Buck 2001 added, there are many reasons why the listening process may
go wrong. This could be due to the background noise, or distracted attention, or be thinking of something else. Moreover, for second-language listeners, they could
have other difficulties, such as unknown vocabulary, complex syntax, or the text could be just too fast.
2. Listening Comprehension
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