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3. Listening Theory
This part is divided into three sections: the nature of listening, the listening process, and the teaching listening. The nature of listening discusses the definition
of the listening skill. The listening process discusses two kinds of listening process, namely bottom up and top-down. The teaching listening discusses how
the listening skill is taught in the classroom.
a. The Nature of Listening
Listening is one of four skills in language learning besides speaking, reading, and writing. In daily life communication, the listening skill takes an
important part as a way to obtain information from others. Goh 2002 states, “listening is taken up as much as 50 of our everyday communication time” p.
1. It means that half of our daily life communication is used for listening and people get much more information by listening rather than using the other skills.
In the teachinglearning activity, the students also obtain the information about something by listening. It is supported by Rost 1994, who states that the
listening is a significant skill in the language classroom because it provides input for the learners. Without understanding the input at the right level, any learning
activity cannot begin. It means that the listening skill is the basis to learn the other skills, such as reading, speaking, and writing.
Listening is not only a hearing activity but also a process of matching what they hear with their knowledge. As stated by Marc Helgesen, “listening is very
active because the learners not only hear but also connect what they hear to the information they already know” as cited in Nunan, 2003, p. 24. It is supported
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by Hermandez and Campos 2010 that listening is not only a process of receiving and recording aural input, but also interpreting what they hear. They also say that
the listeners have to use their own background and linguistic knowledge to understand the information contained in the aural input.
b. Listening Process
According to Goh 2002, there are two kinds of listening process: top- down listening and bottom-up. Buck 2001 revelas that both processes are
distinguished based on the different types of knowledge applied during comprehension.
1 Top-down listening
The top-down listening refers to the application of the background knowledge scheme to analyze, interpret, and store information for facilitating
and hence comprehension Goh, 2002. He also adds that pre-listening activities in the listening task facilitate the top-down listening. It is because the pre-listening
activities provide the activities which are oriented to prepare the students by encouraging them to activate or acquire relevant types of word knowledge Goh,
2002. It is supported also by Brown 2006,
who reveals, “top-down means using prior knowl
edge and experience and use them to understand” p. 2. It means that the top-down listening uses the background knowledge or experience of the
students to understand the meaning of a language. Richards and Rodgers 1986 serve the example of top-down listening: assigning an interaction to part of a
particular event; assigning a place, a person or things to categories; inferring cause
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and effect relationships; anticipating outcome; inferring the topic of a discourse; inferring the sequence between events; and inferring missing details.
2 Bottom-up listening Goh 2002 states that the bottom-up listening refers to a process by which
sounds are used to build increasingly larger units of information, such as words, phrase, clause, and sentences before the aural input is understood. It is supported
by Buck 2001, who says, “Bottom-up views language comprehension as a
process of passing a number of consecutive stages or levels and the output of each stage as the input for the next higher level” p. 2. Richards and Rodgers 1986
also add that the bottom-up listening includes the scanning of the input to identify familiar lexical items, segmenting the stream of speech into constituents, and
using phonological cues and grammatical cues to organize the input. The same opinion is stated by Brown 2006 that the bottom-up listening means using
information about sounds, word meanings, and discourse market like first, then, and after that to assemble the understanding of what has been heard one step at a
time. Both listening processes are related to each other and they can help the
students find the meaning from what they learn. Brown 2006 adds that the students need both of the listening processes because those processes can help
them in comprehending listening materials well. The students must hear some sounds bottom-up listening and hold them in their working memory to connect
them to each other and interpret what they have heard before something new
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comes. At the same time, the students use their background knowledge top-down listening to determine the meaning Brown, 2006.
c. Teaching Listening