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4. Micro and Macro skills
Brown 2001: 256 elaborates listening into two major skills. They are micro and macro skills implied in the performance of listening comprehension. There are 17
objectives to assess in listening categorized in the micro and macro skills.
a. Micro Skills
Listening micro skills includes 11 points to be considered, they are as follows: 1 Discriminating among the distinctive sounds of English.
2 Retaining chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory. 3 Recognizing English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed
positions, rhythmic structure, intonation contours, and their role in signaling information.
4 Recognizing reduced forms of words. 5 Distinguishing word boundaries, recognize a core of words, and interpret
word order patterns and their significance. 6 Processing speech at different rates of delivery.
7 Processing speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other performance variables.
8 Recognizing grammatical word classes nouns, verbs, etc., systems e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.
9 Detecting sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents.
10 Recognizing that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms.
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11 Recognizing cohesive devices in spoken discourse. Regarding phonics listening materials for kindergarten students, the writer
would like to take some points in the micro skills; they are discriminating among the distinctive sounds of English, retaining chunks of language of
different lengths in short-term memory and recognizing reduced forms of words.
b. Macro Skills
The larger scopes of listening skills are stated in the macro skills; namely: 1 Recognizing the communicative functions of utterances, according to
situations, participants, goals. 2 Inferring situations, participants, goals using real world knowledge.
3 From events, ideas, and so on, describe, predict outcomes, infer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects, and detect such
relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification.
4 Distinguishing between literal and implied meanings. 5 Using facial, kinetics, body language, and other nonverbal clues to show the
meanings. 6 Developing and using a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting key
words, guessing the meaning of words from context, appealing for help, and signaling comprehension.
T hese macro skills are beneficial to develop the students’ listening mastery and
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they provide the teachers with some skills which can be used to assess the student’s listening mastery. However, the writer would not apply those macro
skills in this study because they are not suitable for kindergarten students. One point to be considered is using facial, kinesics, body language, and other
nonverbal clues to decipher meanings because the students need to understand the meaning of each word in analytical phonics.
5. Activities for Developing Auditory and Aural Skills
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