11 needs bottom-up and top-down processing to comprehend the passage. Eysenck
1993 as cited in Goh, 2002, p. 6 states “top-down and bottom-up processing occur at the same time in what is known as parallel processing”.
b. Learners’ Problems in Listening Skill
According to Brown Yule 1983 there are listener factors that affect listening difficulty: what is the listener’s role eavesdropper or participant? What
level of response is required? How interested is the listener in the subject? Therefore those criteria affect learner’s level of difficulty in learning listening.
There are significant factors in task difficulty. The factors are likely the organization of the information, the familiarity of the topic, the explicitness and
sufficiency of the information, the type of referring expressions used, and whether the text describes a static or dynamic relationship.
To overcome the problem, there must be a motivation from the learners. According to Watson and Smeltzer 1984 as cited in Nunan, 1999 there are
factors internal to the learner such as attentiveness, motivation, interest in and knowledge of the topic, can have a marked bearing on listening success.
c. Teaching Listening
According to Nunan 1999, listening exercises provide teachers with the means for drawing learners’ attention to new forms vocabulary, grammar, new
interaction patterns in the language pp. 141-142. Harmer 2007 states that the students should be encouraged to listen to various kinds of listening sources as
often as possible p. 135. In addition, the students need to listen to the audio more than once to catch the missing things.
12 In teaching listening, the teachers should assess the learners on their
progress of learning listening. Anderson and Lynch1988 states that most teachers use test tools to teach listening. In addition, Anderson and Lynch state
that listening exercises are designed as the media for practicing aural comprehension which direct students to learn more. Listening test should not be
used as the assessment to measure students’ understanding but on the other hands, students should be given more practice and various kinds of listening activities to
deal with other problems. Harmer 2007 offers six listening principles for the teachers to help the
students in improving listening skill p. 135. Those principles as follows: 1
Encourage students to listen as often and as much as possible. The more students listen, the better they get at listening and understand the
pronunciation. It will make the students more familiar to English pronunciation since they are accustomed to listening to English vocabulary and conversations.
2 Help students prepare to listen.
The students need to be made ready to listen in order to be in position to predict what kind of topic is coming. It will help the students to have better
listening because of the familiar topic and vocabulary. 3
Once may not be enough. There are almost no occasions when the teacher will play an audio track
only once. The students will want to listen to it again to pick up the things they missed the first time.
13 4
Encourage the students to respond to the content of a listening, not just to the language.
An important part of listening sequence is for teachers to draw the meaning of what is being said, discern what is intended and find out what
impression it makes on the students. 5
Different listening stages demand different listening tasks. The teachers need to set different tasks for different listening stages. The
tasks may need to be fairly straightforward and general. That way, the students’ general understanding and response can be successful.
6 Good teachers exploit listening texts to the full.
If the teachers ask the students to invest time and emotional energy in a listening text – and if they themselves have spent time choosing and preparing the
listening sequence – then it makes sense to use the audio track or live listening experience for as many different applications as possible.
d. Types of Listening Activities
