10 comprehension can be measured by content-focus assessment.
3. Assessing Listening
Assessing listening is different from assessing other skills. H. Douglas Brown 2004: 120 explained four types of listening performance that can be
assessed in listening class. Here are the four types of listening performances. -
Intensive This performance assesses students to listen for perception of the components,
such as phonemes, words, intonation, etc. -
Responsive This performance assesses students to listen to a relatively short stretch of
language, such as a greeting, question, command, comprehension check, etc. -
Selective This performance assesses students to process stretches of discourse to scan for
certain information. - Extensive
This performance assesses students to develop a top-down, global understanding of spoken language.
B. Theoretical Framework
In this part the researcher would relate the theory with this research. As what Rivers 1981 defined, this research was conducted because of the
importance of listening. Listening is used more than speaking even in the classroom. Everytime the students listen to the teacher’s explanation, they also
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11 need listening skill to understand.
From the explanation of Gary Buck 2001 about different types of knowledge in listening, this research would use the second type, i.e. non-linguistic
knowledge. The researcher looked into the participants’ understanding on the information from the recording. Therefore, other things related to linguistic
knowledge would not be the focus in this research. The students’ problem was
about the focus in listening class. Students focused more on word per word so that they could not understand the whole content of the recording that they heard. The
focus of listening from word per word should be changed into focusing to the whole content of the recording.
This research used top-down view. The information was understood from the top. The students understood the recording from the topic first. Then they
went to more detailed information. The focus was that students understood what they heard.
The researcher used content-focus assessment to replace word-focus assessment which teachers usually used in listening class. It aims to achieve the
objective of this research, which is changing s tudents’ focus from word per word
to the content. As what Theresa Butori 2010 explained about the significance impact from content-focus assessment, the researcher found that content-focus
assessment could be the solution to research participants’ problem. It would change students’ focus to the content, so that the goal of listening itself would be
achieved. From Brown 2004 explanation, the listening performance seen in this
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12 research is the extensive one. The researcher limited the research to see stud
ents’ perfomance related to their understanding of the spoken language from the
recording. Therefore, the researcher used content-focus assessment to improve this performance.
The materials used in this research were chosen based on the topic listed in the syllabus of English subject. From the topic listed, the researcher looked for the
recordings in the online website. Therefore, the materials used were related to the curriculum.
The National Strategies explanation about deeper comprehension that students can obtain is another advantage of content-
focus assessment. Students’ understanding of the recording could be measured when they did content-focus
assessment. Hence, students’ listening skill would also improve, from listening and focusing on word per word to listening and focusing on the whole content of
the recording. That improvement showed the increase of students’ listening skill.
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13
CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY
