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2. Listening Skill
Listening is an attempt to discriminate sounds, understand vocabulary and grammatical structures, interpret stress and intention, retain and interpret
information of audio stimuli Wipf, 1984. It implies that listening skill is human’s ability to interpret and understand the information in the form of audio.
In this research listening skill refers to students ability to acquire and understand information from a certain source material used in a teaching-learning process.
Listening has emerged as an important component in the process of second language acquisition Feyten, 1991.
Wolven Coakley suggested that listening is an active process consisting of our components: the physiological process of receiving, attending or focused
perception of selected stimuli, assigning meaning to the aural stimuli heard and attended, and remembering or storing aural stimuli for the future recall. Listening
can be improved through training and practice Nichols and Stevens, 1983.
3. Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab
Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab is an online web in which people can access a lot of listening materials and exercises. Although the title of the web
contains the word ‘ESL’, the creator Randall said that this web can be used by anyone from any place in the world to improve their listening skill. At first
Randall made this web to be used as learning media for his students, but along the development of this web, Randall started to introduce this web to other people.
This web became very popular and now even people in EFL countries might use it
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as learning media. The URL of the web is http:www.esl-lab.com. Due to the fact that it is a web and can only be accessed using internet connection and
computer, the learning process which uses this media can be considered as ‘E- learning’. “E-learning” can be defined as an instruction delivered electronically
via the Internet, Intranets, or multimedia platforms such as CD-ROM or DVD Hall, 2003; O’Neill, Singh, O’Donoghue, 2004. In this case, the students in
SMA N 7 use Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab as the media to do self-pace independent learning. The creator of this web Randall made this web to provide
people a facility to improve their English listening skill independently. The materials in this web are totally acceptable and useful for EFL students who want
to improve their listening skill. By accessing this web, people may improve their listening without having to depend to others or joining a listening class.
Unfortunately, people need internet connection to access this web, so there might be some limitation for people who do not have required facility to access this web.
Screenshot 2.1 The homepage of RECLL More screenshots might be viewed in appendix 4
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