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CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter describes the theories adopted in this research to seek common ground in order to prolong the research. Principally essential is the understanding on
listening; its nature and how it is taught in common schools. Not less important is the term learning autonomy, its components and their shares in improving learning
autonomy. Listening journal and self-awareness would also be elaborated in to seek way to elicit learners’ learning autonomy, as well as how it works.
A. Theoretical Description
This section presents related theories which support this study. Presented in this section are three interrelated areas of inquiries which solidify the ground for this
research. They are the nature of listening, its teaching practice in schools, and more important is metacognition and learning autonomy, discussed together to show their
close relationship.
1. The Nature of Listening
Categorized distinctively from the other language skills, listening is in short a real-time, aural receptive skill Clark and Clark, 1977; Helgesen, 2003. This skill is
built up to acquire meaning from sounds which listeners perceive in a language. It is the most basic skill human beings have ever acquired to communicate with each
other. Normally, humans listen to each other to get the meaning of the spoken utterance and to do something with the meaning; i.e. to utilize the acquired meaning.
8 PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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This means that most of the time, listeners are supposed to, verbally or non-verbally, respond the message they hear.
It seems evident that listening is a complicated process. Listening is indeed a complex mental process. Listening requires more than just capturing the sounds
through ears and matches the strings of sounds with listeners’ mental lexical items stored in their brain to build the meaning. It also requires adequate world knowledge
on the part of the listeners to both comprehend and utilize meaning out of the sounds they hear. It is this relation to the brain, reminding us of cognition, that listening is
said as a mental process. Helgesen, 2003 To most psycholinguist this is called comprehension and utilization. To
comprehend something, without yet utilizing it or simply speaking –responding to it, a listener should break down the sounds into pieces. Some possible approaches are
proposed. They are syntactic approach and semantic approach. Syntactic approach would be that which uses to its most the face structure of an utterance and relies
heavily on the use of the function words. While semantic approach is one that relies on the content words and refers to reality what the relationships between those
content words, which would be thus forming the meaning. Psycholinguists do not agree about whether one approach dominates another. They agree, however, that
most listeners use both approaches to get the meaning out of sounds. It means that listeners, in an attempt to understand or get the meaning of an utterance and in turn
respond to it, use function words, content words and their knowledge of the world in which they live Clark Clark, 1977.
These processes, however, could be simplified. Most experts in language teaching and applied linguistics refer to those approaches with slight modification as
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top-down, bottom-up and interactive processing. Top-down process in listening is a process of getting the meaning out of sounds by making the most of content, that is
general knowledge or life experience, and textual schema, their situational routines. On the other hand, bottom-up process in listening is a process that makes use of
vocabulary, grammar, and sounds’ features. As it is disputed between Psycholinguists, these experts also find it more logical to believe that it is easier to
comprehend the meaning if a listener operates within these two processes combined together; constituting what is then known as “interactive process” Brown, 2001.
If these processes, despite the researcher’s attempt to simplify, are found to be intricate, it is the nature of listening. It is a very complex mental process. This
mental process is there to always serve a purpose; to enable listener to respond both in verbal or non-verbal replies. It could, however, be broken down into top-down,
bottom-up and interactive process of listening. They respectively related to semantic approach, syntactic approach and combination of the two. It is now clear to state that
listening is a real-time, aural receptive skill Helgesen, 2003.
2. The teaching of listening and Curriculum of English Language in High schools in Indonesia
For being its receptive nature, listening has to do with information processing. Nowadays, information in general could be acquired via various sources. Basically,
one could acquire information of any kind in two forms; written and spoken. To understand the former is beyond this essay scope. The latter, however, could be
understood by listening. The information, when processed, could add to the listener’s knowledge. It could also affect the listeners in various way; changes in
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