1. Functional Communication Activities The objective of communication activities is to direct the students to be
involved in the communication, in which they have to understand the meaning of language as effective as possible. These activities are used to develop certain
language functions. The activities include comparing sets of pictures, recognizing similarities and differences, sequencing events in a set of pictures, discovering
missing features in a map, giving and performing instruction how to do something, and solving problems from shared clues.
2. Social Interaction Activities The main purpose of these activities is to give learners a chance to use the
target language in the social context. The activities are conversations and discussion, dialogues and role plays, simulations, skits, improvisations, and
debates. These two types of communicative activities in CLT are the bases in designing a set of English instructional listening materials for the students of SMA
N 1 Depok, Sleman.
3 The Teacher’s Role in CLT
The goal of a teacher who uses CLT is to enable the students to communicate in the target language. In order to attain the goal, the teacher plays an
important role to be responsible for establishing situations likely to promote communication. During the activities, the teacher acts as an adviser by answering
students’ questions and monitoring their performance. A teacher might take a note of their errors to be worked on at a later time during more accuracy-based activities.
At other times a teacher might be a communicator engaging in the communicative activity along with students Littlewood, 1983.
4 The Students’ Role in CLT
According to Freeman 2000, pp. 129, 130, students are all communicators. They are all actively engaged in negotiating meaning, in trying to make them
understood, and in understanding others even when their knowledge of the target language is incomplete. Also, since the teacher’s role is less dominant, students are
seen as more responsible managers of their own learning. In short, the roles of
students in CLT, according to Freeman 2000, pp 129, 130, are negotiator, interactor, giving as well as taking.
5 The Role of Materials in CLT
To overcome typical problems, that students cannot transfer what they learn in the classroom to the outside world and to expose students to natural language in
a variety of situations, adherents of CLT advocate the use of language materials authentic to native speakers of the target language Freeman, 2000, p. 32. Besides
the authentic materials, CLT is promoting communicative language use, and the CLT is dealing with task-based materials. In short, the materials are to promote the
communicative language use, task based materials and authentic materials.
2. The Nature of Listening
Language is seen as a major device in the communication both in spoken or written. Speakers can share knowledge and information in the communication using
a similar language it can be mother tongue, but problems might happen when there are a speaker and a listener who have different mother tongues. This rationale
draws a conclusion that language learning is important. Language learning happens when it is deliberate. As what had proposed by Krashen 1982, p. 10, that is
Language acquisition is a subconscious process; language acquirers are not usually aware of the fact that they are
acquiring language, but are only aware of the fact that they are using the language for communication. The result of
language
acquisition, acquired
competence, is
also subconscious. We are generally no consciously aware of the
rules of the languages we acquired. Instead, we have a “feel” for correctness.
Language acquisition is different from language learning. As stated by Krashen 1982, p. 10, the term “learning” henceforth refers to conscious
knowledge of a second language, knowing the rules, being aware of them, and being able to talk about them. The review is clear to explain that language learning
happens when a speaker and a listener consciously find a difficulty. Acquisition and learning do not start with speaking or writing, because a
language learner or a language acquirer needs to imitate something first. This means that there should be a model first; it is listening for speaking, and reading for
writing. In that case, receptive skills are followed by productive skills. Therefore, an appropriate sequence to present language learning is needed, as appropriate as a
child speaks first before he writes. It implies that listening is a major skill in language acquisition. When a child starts to speak, he will not speak something
without listening first. It means that listening always precedes speaking. In other words, listening is an active, purposeful process of making sense of what we hear,
listening is very important in language learning process, because listening provides input for the learners. Without understanding input at the right level, any learning
simply cannot begin. When a learner has input, then he processes the input in the brain to imitate the language features of input and sets the rule of language, so that
the learners will produce language at least the same as what they intake from the PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
input. Listening is seen as a major source of comprehensible input. Language learning textbooks begins including listening activities that are not simply
presentation of language to be produced Helgesen cited in Nunan, 2003, p. 26.
a. Learning Listening
Usually the student is mainly listening during the class period, and is mainly reading and writing during the study period. On this basis alone, it is evident that
efficient listening is a keystone in learning Lancaster, 1974, p. 79. Listening is to start other learning skills, but listening is not considered as an essential learning
skill. As cited in Richards and Renandya 2002, p. 238, David Nunan in the
introduction proposed, listening is Cinderella skill in second language learning. All too often, it has been overlooked by its elder sister – speaking. For most people,
being able to claim knowledge of second language means being able to speak and write in that language. Listening and reading are therefore secondary skills. In fact,
these secondary skills are the basic skills to learn in order to enhance the productive skills namely speaking and writing. Nevertheless, the emphasis is on the very basic
sequence of language learning as seen in language acquisition when a baby speaks first and then writes. This means that learning listening is the basic learning in
language learning. The views of bottom-up processing and top-down processing listening have
dominated since early 1980’s. The bottom up processing model assumes that listening is a process of decoding the sounds that one hears in a linear fashion, from
the smallest meaningful units phonemes to complete texts Hegelsen cited in PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
