Listening in the Classroom

29 The first stage is to do a pre-teach vocabulary. This stage enables the students to accommodate them in completing the tasks after listening to the recording. The second stage is to establish interest in the topic. To increase the students’ interest in the topic, the teacher can use some pictures related to the story or recording they will hear and ask the students to predict what the recording will be about. The third stage is to give “a listening for gist task” or “listening specific information”. The teacher plays the recording for the first time to get the students used to the voices and speed of the recording. Then, by asking some easy questions such as “What are they talking about? How many people are talking?” the teacher leads the students to gain the gist from the recording. The fourth stage is to give “a listening for detail”. In this stage, the teacher can ask more questions to get the more detail of information from the recording. A question such as “How do you know that they are friends or not?” can be delivered. Furthermore, the last stage is to give “a follow-up activity” based on the topic. In this activity the teacher can either ask the students to talk about their favorite bed time stories or discuss the specific language point used in the recording. By staging the lesson such as above, the teacher helps the students to prepare themselves for what is to come as well as building the students’ interest in enjoying the listening class. However, there are other things the teachers can do to help the students enjoy their listening lesson as well as improve their listening skill. The kind of help would be some tips, which are proposed by Riddell 2001, pp. 112-113. When using the tape recording, the teachers should place the machine as close as 30 it should be to the students as well as play the recording for a few second first to check whether it is audible or not. Before the students listening to the recording, give the students the task and chance to read the instruction and the questions first. It is also good for the students to be convinced to not worry if they find it difficult at first because the teachers will play the recording for the second time or probably three times. Finally, having a discussion on the task after listening to the recording will help the students a lot.

4. School-based Curriculum

School-based curriculum is the latest curriculum applied in Indonesia’s education system. According to Muslich 2007, school-based curriculum is “an operational curriculum which is arranged and conducted by each school” p. 17. This statement means the school is responsible for developing the curriculum. In school-based curriculum, the study of English in junior high school aims to encourage the students to reach a functional level which is to communicate verbally or in written form in order to solve the daily problems. The school-based curriculum consists of syllabus which at least covers the competence standard and basic competence. The competence standard of English listening skill for eighth graders of junior high school semester two consists of two parts. One part is to understand the meaning of simple transactional and interpersonal conversation to interact with surroundings. The competence standard is followed by the basic competence which consists of two parts. The first is to respond meanings in spoken simple short functional text 31 accurately, fluently, and acceptably in order to be able to interact with surroundings. The second is to respond meanings in simple short monologue accurately, fluently, and acceptably in order to be able to interact with surroundings in the form of narrative and recount text.

B. Review of Related Studies

In this part, the writer discusses some related studies on task-based language teaching. Among many related studies on TBLT, the writer reviews five of them. The study which was conducted by Jeon and Hahn 2006 studied about the teachers’ perceptions on the use of TBLT in Korean secondary school classroom. Their study showed that the teachers were interested in implementing TBLT as an instructional method to teach their students in the classroom. The teachers had a higher level of understanding of TBLT concepts which made them believe TBLT could help them give the students more chances to work in group rather than being passive learners. Since the students, in the Korean EFL context, did not have many chances to deal with native speakers, the implementation of TBLT helped the teachers facilitated the use of target language in the classroom. However, the study found that some of the teachers still had a lack of confidence in implementing TBLT. Therefore, John and Hahn recommended the teachers join teacher education programs, which provide training about language teaching methodologies. Izadpanah 2010 introduced TBLT in his study. He discussed the theory of TBLT and gave a recommendation to implement the TBLT in the classroom.