5. Use facial, kinesics, body language, and other nonverbal clues to deciper
meaning. 6.
Develop and use battery of listening strategies, such as detecting key words, guessing the meaning of words from contexts, appealing for help,
and signalling comprehension or lack there of.
4. Listening Strategies
Successful listening can also be looked at in terms of the strategies the listener uses when listening Richards, 2008: 11. Strategies can be thought of as
the ways in which a learner approaches and manages a task and listeners can be taught effective ways of approaching and managing their listening. These
activities involved listeners actively in the process of listening. Buck 2001:104 identifies two kinds of strategies in listening:
1. Cognitive strategies: Mental activities related to comprehending and
storing input in working memory or long-term memory for later retrieval. Comprehension processes: Associated with the processing of linguistic
and nonlinguistic input. Storing and memory processes: Associated with the storing of linguistic
and nonlinguistic input in working memory or long-term memory. Using and retrieval processes: Associated with accessing memory, to be
readied for output. 2.
Metacognitive strategies: Those conscious or unconscious mental activities that perform an executive function in the management of
cognitive strategies. perpustakaan.uns.ac.id
commit to user
Assessing the situation: Taking stock of conditions surrounding a language task by as
sessing one‟s own knowledge, one‟s available internal and external resources, and the constraints of the situation
before engaging in a task. Monitoring: Determining the effectiveness of one‟s own or another‟s
performance while engaged in a task. Self-evaluating: Determining the effectiveness of one‟s own or
another‟s performance after engaging in the activity. Self-testing: Testing oneself to determine the effectiveness of one‟s
own language use or the lack thereof.
5. The Process of Listening
Nunan 1998:25 states that successful listeners use both bottom-up and top-down strategies. Richards 2008:4 classifies the process of listening into two.
a. The Bottom-Up Processing
Bottom-up processing refers to using the incoming input as the basis for understanding the message. Comprehension begins with the received data that is
analyzed as successive levels of organization sounds, words, clauses, sentences, texts until meaning is derived. Comprehension is viewed as a process of decoding.
The listene r‟s lexical and grammatical competence in a language provides the
basis for bottom-up processing. The input is scanned for familiar words, and grammatical knowledge is used to work out the relationship between elements
of sentences. perpustakaan.uns.ac.id
commit to user
Clark and Clark 1977:49 summarized this view of listening. 1.
Listeners take in raw speech and hold a phonological representation of it in working memory.
2. They immediately attempt to organize the phonological representation into
constituents, identifying their content and function. 3.
They identify each constituent and then construct underlying propositions, building continually onto a hierarchical representation of propositions.
4. Once they have identified the propositions for a constituent, they retain
them in working memory and at some point purge memory of the phonological representation. In doing this, they forget the exact wording
and retain the meaning. In the classroom, examples of the kinds of tasks that develop bottom-up listening
skills require listeners to do the kinds of things: 1.
Identify the referents of pronouns in an utterance 2.
Recognize the time reference of an utterance 3.
Distinguish between positive and negative statements 4.
Recognize the order in which words occurred in an utterance 5.
Identify sequence markers 6.
Identify key words that occurred in a spoken text 7.
Identify which modal verbs occurred in a spoken text perpustakaan.uns.ac.id
commit to user
b. Top-Down Processing
Top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message. It goes from meaning to
language. The background knowledge required for top-down processing may be previous knowledge about the topic of discourse, situational or contextual
knowledge, or knowledge in the for m of “schemata” or “scripts” plans about the
overall structure of events and the relationships between them. Exercises that require top-down processing devel
op the learner‟s ability to do:
1. Use key words to construct the schema of a discourse
2. Infer the setting for a text
3. Infer the role of the participants and their goals
4. Infer causes or effects
5. Infer unstated details of a situation
6. Anticipate questions related to the topic or situation
In real-world listening, both bottom-up and top-down processing generally occur together. The extent to which one or the other dominates depends
on the listener‟s familiarity with the topic and content of a text, the density of
information in a text, the text type, and the listener‟s purpose in listening.
6. The Difficulty in Listening Skill
All language learners face difficulties when listening to the target language. Listening requires consid
erable training because it‟s a difficult skill requiring multiple sub-skills and stages, which have to be undertaken
commit to user
simultaneously. Anderson and Lynch 1988: 4 have identified the stages in the process of listening:
1. The spoken signals have to be identified from the midst of surrounding
sounds. 2.
The continuous stream of speech has to be segmented into units, which have to be recognized as known words.
3. The syntax of the utterance has to be grasped and the speaker‟s intended
meaning has to be understood. 4.
Listeners also have to apply our linguistic knowledge to formulating a correct and appropriate response to what has been said.
Listening, therefore, requires the ability to understand phonology, syntax, lexis and information content within real time. Apart from time pressure, there are
also problems stemming from inexplicit information given by the speaker and environmental obstructions such as distracting noise in the background, unclear
voice or soundof recording, and lack of visual support to assist listening. Hedge 2000:237 lists some problems which are internal to the listener such as lack of
motivation towards the topic, negative reaction to the speaker or to the event; anxiety to rehearse
one‟s own contribution to a debate or the next part of a conversation, to the extent of missing what the current speaker is saying; or
distraction by the content of a talk into thinking about a related topic thereby losing the thread ofthe argument.
commit to user
D. Using Authentic Materials to Teach Listening
The main function of the second-language classroom is be to provide learners with authentic language Ciccone, 1995:
203-215. According to Herron and Seay 1991:
487-495, the teacher should exploit more authentic texts in all levels of language instruction in order to involve students in activities that reflect
real-life listening. Morrison 1989: 14-18 also believes that authentic listening
materials could and should be used at all levels from beginners to advanced. Even beginning students needed exposure to authentic language since it is the medium
of everyday communication Oxford, Lavine, Crookall, 1989; Porter Roberts, 1981; Scarcella Oxford, 1992
Classroom listening should prepare students for real listening; aural authentic texts would expose students to real language from the beginning of their
language study Bacon, 1992; Morton, 1999. Students working with authentic materials gained valuable practice in the specific skill of making sense of live
speech without necessarily understanding every word of structure; then, an increase in listening comprehension is a natural consequence of this practice
Herron Seay, 1991. Herron and Seay 1991: 487-495 believe that students,
with proper instructional planning by the teacher, can be led to extract general and specific meaning from oral authentic texts while improving general listening-
comprehension skills. Using authentic materials allowed students to experience early in their study the rewards of learning a language.
Bacon and Finnemann 1990: 459-473 find that when students are
properly prepared, authentic materials had a positive effect on both perpustakaan.uns.ac.id
commit to user
