The Significance of the Study

sense of the question; 7 The listener determines whether to store the information in short-term or long-term memory; and 8 The listener deletes the form in which the message was received and keeps important information or concept, if there is any. 3 The arguments above prove that, contrary to popular belief, listening is not a passive process of receiving whatever kinds of sound into the ears. Rather, listening is a process where a listener actively processes the information behind the sounds in order to understand what the speaker means. Among the four language skills, listening and reading are categorized as receptive skills, while speaking and writing are productive skills. Even though listening and reading are both receptive skills, the two certainly have differences. The main difference is the medium. Listening skill is concerned with spoken language, while reading skill is concerned with written language. Buck stated that the medium is noteworthy because with spoken language, once the speaker completed his or her utterance, it will be gone without a trace. Unlike when they read something, people cannot go back to see what they just listened. Therefore, they need to rely on their own memory of what was said. 4 In addition, there are many other characteristics of spoken language that are different from written language and are often problematic for English language learners. These characteristics will be discussed more thoroughly in the upcoming subchapter. Listening is not the only skill that is concerned with spoken language. The other related skill is speaking. Between listening and speaking, the former usually gets less attention than the latter even though listening is equally important as speaking. Brown exemplified how underrated listening is through a very common case, namely the way people say the question ―Do you speak English?‖ In this case, of course the asker means ―Do you listenunderstand English?‖ as well, but people tend to think of only speaking when they talk about foreign language. 5 He 3 H. Douglas Brown, Teaching by Principles, New York: Pearson ESL, 2000, 2 nd edition, pp. 249 – 250. 4 Gary Buck, ―How to Become a Good Listening Teacher‖, in David J. Mendelsohn and Joan Rubin ed, A Guide for the Teaching of Second Language Listening, San Diego: Dominie Press, Inc., 1995, p.113. 5 H. Douglas Brown, op. cit., p. 247. also mentioned that students listen more often than speaking in the classroom and listening is what builds their comprehension of the language. Unfortunately, teachers used to be very engrossed by speaking. Very often students were asked to speak something in foreign language without even knowing the meaning. Brown then stated that listening is the skill that should be given more emphasis, especially in classroom. 6 Rivers advocated the importance of listening skill by illustrating a situation that involves a traveler. A person who is traveling in a foreign country with little to no speaking skill could still use gestures or dictionary to communicate with a foreigner. However, if that person does not have listening skill, he or she would not be able to understand what is happening around him or her, which may lead to confusion, frustration, andor embarrassment. 7 It may be true that listening skill used to be neglected. However, considering its importance, especially in communication, many language specialists and researchers have given more attention to listening in the past decades. It can be seen in the numerous publications dealing with listening skill and how to teach it. Some of the emerging English language teaching approaches and methods, like the Natural Approach and Total Physical Response, also have stressed the importance of listening comprehension in learning English. All the researches have been valuable because listening is indeed an interesting field that needs to be explored and developed more.

2. The Views on Listening

As complex as it seems, there have been efforts to understand listening process better. There are two general views on how listening process works: bottom-up and top-down views. The bottom-up model views listening as a linear process. A listener reaches understanding by decoding parts to whole, i.e. from smallest meaningful units phonemes to complete texts or utterances. 8 Listeners 6 Ibid. 7 Wilga M. Rivers, Listening Comprehension, The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1966, p. 196. 8 David Nunan, Listening in Language Learning, in Jack C. Richards and Willy A. Renandya eds, Methodology in Language Learning, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 238 – 239. begin with understanding the phonetic level and gradually move to higher level: syllabic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and interpretative level. 9 Consequently, meaning is obtained once the listener reaches the last step in the process. The top-down model has a closer meaning to the description of listening in the beginning of this skripsi. It views listening as a process wherein the listener actively reconstructs the original meaning of the speaker by using incoming sounds as clues. The listener uses background knowledge as well as the context and situation to make sense of what he or she hears. 10 In other words, the listener uses what heshe already know to predict what the message will contain, and uses parts of the message to confirm, correct or add to this ‗prediction‘. In this scenario, understanding is obtained gradually by the listener. Understanding these two processing models is necessary when teachers need to develop courses, materials, or lessons. For example, teachers should not only teach bottom-up processing skills, like the skill to differentiate minimal pair, but also encourage students to use their background knowledge and see the context. For example, a teacher who is teaching the minimal pair І and i: may not only give the explanation of how the phonetic symbols sound. The teacher can give a sentence like “The sheep is in the field” and ask the students to examine the clues in the sentence in order to decide which phonetic sound is present. For classroom activities, the students may use a processing model for a particular purpose and the other for a different purpose. For example in listening to details, bottom-up model is used, while in listening for gist, the top-down model is used. Ideally, the real listening process is the integration of the botom-up and top- down models. Sometimes listeners need to pick up the details in order to understand the whole utterance, while other times they need to rely on their background knowledge. 11 9 Ian S. P. Nation and Jonathan Newton, Teaching ESLEFL Listening and Speaking, New York: Routledge, 2009, p. 40. 10 David Nunan, loc. cit. 11 Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching, Malaysia: Pearson Education Limited, 2001, 3 rd Edition, p. 201.