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understand what the speaker has said, think about whether it makes sense.
Listening requires listeners to interpret all massages they hear and see. Effective listening means being able to understand the language grammatical ability and the
way the language is used in a different situation interaction ability. Listening is a psychomotor process of receiving sounds waves through the ear and transmitting
nerve impulse to the brain.
2. Learning to Listen
Listening comprehension also has an important role in determining the learners success in learning language, especially in communication. We cannot
communicate with others if we do not understand what the speaker intends. That is why there is a lot of misunderstanding between the listener and the speaker. Why
misunderstanding always occurs in communication, what the speaker said and
intended, is determined by the listeners ability in answering the speakers question.
Learning to listen in our first language is by no means easy. It requires considerable cognitive development and constant attention to social and linguistic
input over a period of several grades. However, learning to listen in a second language seems to be even more difficult. While it may not require more time to
develop, second language listening is confounded by a number of difficulties. In responding to the students’ difficulties in learning to listen, first the
teacher has to identify and to classify the difficulties that are faced by the students.
xxviii Second, he selects and designs appropriate materials in solving the students
difficulties, in order to make the students more effective listeners. Considering the difficulties or the problems which are faced by the students,
it will be better if the teacher understands how the process of listening comprehension is achieved by them.
According to Helgezen and Brown, students learn to listen or read through two processes, they are bottom-up and top-down 1994: xii:
a. Bottom-up processing. Students start by learning the component parts, such as: words, and grammar. Lynch states that the listener or reader would first
recognize the smallest bits of information in the text and then built them up into words, into phrases, into clauses, and so on, until the whole text had been
decoded 1996: 21. b. Top-down processing. Students start to learn from their background knowledge.
Lynch states that background knowledge is the level that covers a wide range of information and experience stored in memory. For example: general knowledge
of scientific facts and historical events, the belief and conventions of our culture, local knowledge about the place we live, and the individual experiences of our
social and private lives 1996: 21. Furthermore Brown 1997: 11 stated that the active listener will use all
relevant background knowledge of the physical context of the utterance the immediate surroundings, the place, the time of day, etc, knowledge of the
xxix speaker gender, age, known opinions, knowledge of the topic and what the
speaker is likely to know about it, or feel about it , and so on. In short, in the top-down processing, students do not need to pay much
attention to the language used. As in some situations, the topic or the speaker is so familiar that they can take for granted a great deal of what is said. It allows to
anchor their comprehension on what they think is relevant knowledge of the topic, the speaker, and so on.
3. Types of Listening Activities
