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In addition, Gardner and Lambert also state that motivation is very important because it can influence learners’ attitude toward the learning process.
If learners have positive attitudes, it means that they have high motivation in learning. In the contrary, if learners have negative attitudes in learning, it means
that they have low motivation. Low motivation in learning will lead the learners into failure.
Perception and motivation are two important things in the learning process because perception will affect motivation. How the people perceive the
situations around them will influence their desire to do something. Furthermore, it can also affect their behavior. In this research, it means that if the students have
positive perception, their motivation will be higher and they will also behave positively towards the learning process so it can lead them into success.
3. Theory of Listening
a. Definition of Listening
“Listening is a complex process in which the listener takes the incoming data, an acoustic signal, and interprets it based on a wide variety of linguistic and
non linguistic knowledge” Buck, 2001, p. 247. These complexities create the perception that listening is difficult. As the result, the students have a low
motivation to learn listening. However, in learning foreign language, listening is one of the main skills to be mastered
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Harmer 2001 states that listening is an important skill because it provides the great opportunity to hear voices from native speakers, and it also
enables students to improve their own pronunciation as a result of the spoken English they absorb from the listening material p.228. It means that other skills
will be improved through mastering listening skills. Moreover, Nunan 2003: 23 describes that listening is not only receptive
skill. That is, it requires a person to receive and understand incoming information input. Because of this reason, listening is always categorized as passive skill. In
fact, listening is an active one because when people listen, they will combine what they hear with their own ideas or experiences. In other words, the listeners are
“creating meaning” in their minds. In conclusions, listening requires an active process to comprehend what is being said by the speaker.
b. Successful Listening
Listening requires the learners’ ability to play in the process, by listening and then responding what they have heard. The listeners also activate the various
types of knowledge and apply what they know in order to understand what the speaker means Anderson and Lynch, 1988: 6. Besides, the effective listening is
one of the factors that give contribution in making listening successfully. According to Anderson and Lynch 1988, effective listeners are active.
They do not passively receive and record. The listeners are engaged in the process of comprehension: they apply the relevant internal information available to them
in order to construct their own interpretation of what has been said p. 7.
