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input at the right level, any learning simply could not begin. In other words, listening becomes the basic skill in learning foreign language since it is usually used in other
skills: reading, writing, and speaking. Moreover, Rost 2001: 11 states that making listening materials needs a good
understanding of effective teaching that includes careful selection of sources, creative listening materials design, continuous assistance, and integration of listening with
other skills. In teaching listening those aspects are the most important key to hold to create purposeful class activities. Basically, the problem is that many students could
hear but have not learned how to listen and process the information well. According to Nunan, the top-down view suggests that the listener actively
constructs or more accurately, reconstructs the original meaning of the speaker using incoming sounds as clues 2002: 239. It means that we know certain things
about certain topics and situations and use that information to understand. On the other hands, bottom-up processing model assumes that listening is a process of
decoding the sounds that one hears in linear fashion, form the smallest meaningful units phonemes to complete texts 2002: 239. We could say that this model uses
the information we have about sounds, word meanings, and discourse markers like first, then and after that to gather our understanding of what we read or hear one step
at time. Listening requires both bottom-up and top-down processing to comprehend the
passage. In this study, the writer would like to present listening materials that combine bottom-up and top-down processing so that the materials could really help
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the students to be able to apply the real-life communication well.
b. Listening Purpose
There are two listening purposes which need to be discussed in this part. Brown and Yule 1983, as quoted in Richards 1988: 63, elaborates two listening purposes.
The first is interactional functions of language which emphasizes the interaction of the participants to create comfortable and not threatening situation. Brown and Yule
explain that interactional purpose is listener oriented Richards, 1988: 63. The second purpose is the transactional functions of language. It is used for
communicating information and usually called “message oriented”. This function concerns with the interaction with other people related to the language, coherence,
content, and clarity such as, taking notes or carrying out an instruction Richards, 1988: 65.
Both interactional and transactional functions are needed because interactional is used to interact with people, while transactional is used to gain new information and
skills Richards, 1988: 66. In this study, a set of instructional materials would be designed by considering the listening process and purposes in order to help the
students really comprehend real-life listening activities later on.
c. The Importance of Listening
Listening is our primary activity. According to experts, adults spend most of their time listening when they are communicating, college students spend about 45 of
their time listening and in classroom, they spend 57.5 of time Wijayasuriya and Gaudart, 1992: 63. In fact, effective listening is extremely important for students as
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they spend most of their time listening to lectures they have in class. Although listening is an important aspect in second language proficiency, it is often neglected
in English teaching. Therefore, the writer intends to design a set of instructional design materials to help the teacher facilitates their students in listening proficiency
of second language acquisition process.
d. The Principles of Listening
According to Morley as cited by Wijayasuriya and Gaudart, 1992: 73 the recent popular listening design is suggested to follow some principles.
1 The design has to be presented using intrinsically-motivating technique, which refers to the appeal of listeners’ personal interest and goals.
2 The use of authentic language and context in order to enable the learners to see the relevance of the classroom activities and the real communication activities.
3 The listening design should also consider the form of listeners’ response to monitor their understanding to the spoken language.
4 Developing learners’ strategic competence by encouraging the development of listening strategies.
5 To include both bottoms-up and top down listening technique.
e. Learners’ Problems
There are various things that cause the students do not focus in their listening class. According to Ur 1996: 112, the students face some problems in having
listening skill. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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1 The students have problem with sound The students are used to dealing with written exercises and rarely listen to
foreign speech which causes them to have limited information about correct pronunciation.
2 The students have to understand every word The students think that they have to understand every word in order to
understand the whole information. The teachers also support this mistake by demanding the students to understand word by word that causes fatigue towards the
students comes easily. However, the teacher should explain the correct method in listening activity.
3 The students could not understand fast, natural native speech The students usually ask their teacher to speak slowly and repeat the information
when they could not get the main point of the talk. The teacher is supposed to help the students by the nature of native speaking so that they would be more familiar to
listen the teacher properly. 4 The students need to hear things more than once
The students tend to ask repetition when listening to particular information. In contrast, listening occurs only once in real life situation. Ur 1996: 112 suggests that
the teacher uses redundancy text that contains repetition in the important information. 5 The students find it difficult to keep up
The learners feel overloaded with the incoming information Ur, 1996: 112. The solution is not to slow down the discourse, but to encourage the students not to relax,
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and select the important information. 6 The students get tired
Since it is easy for the students to get tired after listening long conversations, the teacher should be creative in giving variations of the speakers’ voice, given pauses
and not to make listening comprehension too long.
f. Teaching Listening
Ur 1996: 105 says, “The objective of listening comprehension practice in the classroom is that students should learn to function successfully in real life listening
situation.” Ur clarifies that the students are expected to understand the utterances using natural speech of speaking, proper diction, and pronunciation so that whenever
they listen to the conversation in English, they would be able to understand it. In addition, they could respond to the daily conversation well.
The teacher’s role is important in creating such supporting situation so that the students experience real-life conversations. The materials should be close to the
students’ daily activities so that they would be able to really apply what they have obtained in their classroom to the real situation.
g. Types of Listening Activities
Ur 1996: 113 proposes four types of listening activities and each type has its own division.
1 No Overt Response The learners just listen to the listening materials without giving any responses.
The activities are stories, songs, and entertainment which could be movie, theater, PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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and videos. 2 Short Response
The learners only give short answers or actions towards listening materials. The activities are obeying instructions, ticking off items, truefalse, detecting mistakes,
cloze, guessing definitions, skimming and scanning. 3 Longer
Response The listeners give longer answers or more actions. The activities are answering
questions, note taking, paraphrasing and translating, summarizing, and long gap filling.
4 Extended Response
The listening activity is only a basic to extend reading, speaking, or writing. The activities included are problem solving and interpretation.
h. Listening Materials and Media
There are some aids used in this design such as pictures and images, vocabulary building, and also the use of music in the designed materials. Since there is no
language laboratory in SMK Pius X Magelang, the writer uses taped materials in this design. Taped materials would help the students to be familiar with the varied sounds
in different characters, situations and voices. Taped materials are also portable and readily available, the tapes are extremely cheap and the machines to play them are
relatively inexpensive Harmer, 2001: 229. The next aids used are pictures. Pictures could vary the materials in the learning
process, including listening. In this study, the writer would apply understanding and PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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prediction activities in which the students need to understand the certain pictures then select the best corresponds to the listening passage, and to predict what is coming
next in a lesson Harmer, 2001: 135 . The use of music also takes part in this study since music is powerful stimulus
for students and it could change the atmosphere in the classroom, or prepare students for new activities Harmer, 2001: 242. Students could learn by completing the
missing lyrics, since many students like to listen to music. Another characteristic used is the vocabulary building. Pre-teaching vocabulary could reduce the language
difficulty problem in the listening class. Besides, it could attract the students’ interest on the topic given.
B. Theoretical Framework
In designing a set of instructional material for the Eleventh grade students of SMK Pius X Magelang, some steps were applied in this study. The design is
developed based on the School-Based Curriculum 2006 which is suited with the teachers’ and students’ needs. The approach used to develop the design is
Communicative Language Teaching, and the method applied to underline the implementation of CLT is Task-Based Instructions. The materials would be designed
for the second semester period as the teachers’ needs and the curriculum applied in SMK Pius X Magelang.
In order to produce the creative and varied design, the classroom activities and tasks are developed using Task-Based principles. Since the Task-Based Instructions
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principle underlies the materials development and reflects the characteristics of CLT as the approach of this study, each term in the listening activities is developed based
on the Task-Based principles. The task would be the focus on the teaching-learning process. Thus, there would be six terms of activities in each chapter of the design
which contains the Task-Based principles. In designing the listening materials, the writer adapted Kemp’s design since it
has already provided the steps needed by the writer to develop effective design of listening materials. Kemp’s design is selected since it emphasizes on the problems,
such as objectives, activities and resources, and also the evaluation. The steps used to develop the materials are adapted from Kemp’s design which would be suited with
R D steps in the next stage of this study. However, there would be some differences between the steps in this study and
Kemp’s since the writer developed and adapted the steps which are suited with the needs in this study. In this study, the revision part would be applied for several steps
in designing the materials, not the whole process. The dotted lines shows the feedback of the revision part for the steps which could be revised in this study. These
are the steps used by the writer in designing the materials:
1. Listing the Students’ Characteristics
In this step, the writer collects all information about the students’ needs, capabilities, and interests. Listing the students’ characteristic is conducted before
designing the materials since the activities of the materials would be suited with the students’ needs and interests. The questionnaires would be distributed for the students
