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Kress 1993: 167 mentions that listening skill is divided into two, namely auditory and aural skills. The auditory is the
ear’s ability to hear meaningful sounds. Auditory refers to the ability to recognize the sounds of a particular language and the
ability to discriminate among similar sounds within the language. These abilities can be gained through training or culturally acquired. On the other hand, the aural skill
refers to the ability of the student to listen and to understand spoken messages. These definitions of listening are going to be concluded as the basis of this study.
Some linguists who have almost the same opinion about what listening is are Myers and Myers, Michael Rost, Underwood, Urr, Richards and Platt, Pretty and Jensen,
Kress, Prochter, and Yagang. They claim that listening is a process of understanding
spoken language. However, Richards and Platt emphasize on the role of individual linguistic unit e.g. phonemes, words, and grammatical structures as well as the role
of the listener expectations, the situation and context, background knowledge, and the topic. Finally, Buck and Heuer expect the students to be able to make sense the
spoken language after they pay attention and understand it. Based on the discussion above, it can be concluded that listening for kindergarten
students is understanding speech which includes the added dimensions of recognizing the sounds, discriminating similar sounds, and understanding words, phrases, and
simple sentences.
2. Listening Processes
In order to comprehend listening, there are two kinds of listening processes. They are bottom up and top down processes. Bottom up processing is
“the use of incoming
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data as a source of information about the meaning of a message Richards, 1988: 59. The listeners digest the information they received such as sounds, words, clauses, and
sentences, so that they can get the meaning. In this process, the listeners receive totally new information which they have never known before. Top down processing
is “the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message” Richards, 2002: 60. The listeners use their previous knowledge about some topics,
situations, characters, events, place, and even their knowledge in long-term memory in the form of script or schema. Top down gives a basic description of the discourse
that helps the listeners understand the context. Listening does not depend only on bottom up processing that recognizes the
words and sentences but it also needs top down processing in order to create the situation in the listeners’ mind. Otherwise, listening not only needs top down
processing but also bottom up because it can help listeners find words’ meaning so
that they have good description of the circumstances. In other words, listening requires bottom up and top down processing to comprehend the passage.
In this study, the writer would like to consider bottom up and top down processing so that the students will be able to understand the spoken words.
3. Listening Purposes
Besides recognizing the differences between bottom up and top down processings, there are two listening purposes which need to be discussed. Richards
1988: 63, as quoted in Brown and Yule 1983, elaborates two listening purposes.
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The first is interactional functions of language. The interactional function of language emphasizes the interaction of the participants to create comfortable and not
threatening situation. Brown and Yule explain that interactional purpose is listener oriented Richard, 2002: 63
. Examples of interactional functions are “greetings, small talk, jokes, complements, casual chat of the kind in which we use in past time
with friends or to make encounters with strangers comfortable” Richards, 2002: 64. The concrete example is when a neighbour knows that a woman next door has just
delivered a baby, he will congratulate her by saying,” Congratulations for your healthy newborn baby, I’m glad to hear about that.” In this situation, the neighbour
shows his sympathy to the woman. The second purpose is the transactional functions of language. It is used for
communicating information and usually called “message oriented”. This transactional function concerns with the interaction with other people related to the language,
coherence, content, and clarity such as, taking notes or carrying out an instruction Richards, 2002: 65.
Both interactional and transactional function are needed because interactional is used to interact with other people, while transactional is used to gain new information
and skills Richards, 2002: 66. However, this study focuses on the transactional purpose in order to understand simple words because it deals with kindergarten
students who have limited vocabulary.
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4. Micro and Macro skills
