from contextual information and from existing knowledge, while relying upon multiple strategic resources to fulfill the task requirement.
In summary, listening is an active process of attaching meaning to the speech sounds. As a listener performs a variety of tasks in a comprehension
process, he or she has to rely upon various types of knowledge such as grammatical knowledge and sociocultural knowledge.
2. The Importance of Listening Skill
It is true that we spend much of our time to listen any sounds as a verbal communication.
However, in the past, reading and grammar skills were paid much attention to while speaking and listening skills were taken for granted. As a result,
language learners did not recognize its importance in developing language skills. Rost 1993 recognition of listening as complex activity and of its critical role in
the language acquisition process has greatly influenced contemporary language teaching practice. The view that listening as an active and interactive process has,
for example, cast the learner in a role other than the passive receiver of aural input.
Rost 1994 emphasizes the importance of listening for several reasons. 1.
Listening is vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learner. Without understandable input at the right level, any learning
simply cannot begin. 2.
Spoken language provides a means of interaction for the learner. Since the learners must interact to achieve understanding, access to speakers of the
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language is essential. Moreover, learners‟ failure to understand the language they hear is impetus, not an obstacle, to interaction and learning.
3. Authentic spoken language presents a challenge for the learner to attempt
to understand language as it is actually used by native speakers. 4.
Listening exercises provide teachers with a means for drawing learners‟ attention to new forms vocabulary, grammar, interaction patterns in the
language. To sum up, listening skill has taken a very important part in learning
English. It is the most communicative and practiced skill that needs to be developed as much as possible.
3. Components of Listening
Richards in Brown 2004:121 provides a list of micro skills attending to the smaller bits and chunks of language, in more of a bottom-up process, and
macro skills focusing on the larger elements involved in top-down approach to a listening task.
Brown 2004:121-122 adapted the micro skills from Richards. 1.
Discriminate among the distinctive sound of English. 2.
Retain chunks of language of different lengthd in short-term memory. 3.
Recognize English stress patterns, word in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, intonation contours, and their role in
signaling information. 4.
Recognized reduced forms of words. perpustakaan.uns.ac.id
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5. Distinguish words boundaries, recognize a core ofwords, and interpret
word order pattern and their significance. 6.
Process speech at different rate of delivery. 7.
Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other performance variables.
8. Recognize grammatical word classes noun, verb,etc, systems e.g., tense,
agreement, pluralization, patterns, rules, elliptical forms. 9.
Detect sentence constituents and distingush between major and minor constituents.
10. Recognize a particular meaning which may be expressed in different
grammatical forms. 11.
Recognize cohesive devicesin spoken discourse. macro skills, the skill focusing on the larger elements are involved in top-
down approach. These are adapted from Richards in Brown 2004:121 as well. 1.
Recognize the communicative function of utterances, according to situations, participants, and goals.
2. Infer situations, participants, goals using real-world knowledge.
3. From event, idea, and so on, described, predict outcomes, infer links and
connection between events, deduce causes and effect, and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given
information, generalization, and exemplification. 4.
Distinguish between literal and implied meaning. perpustakaan.uns.ac.id
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5. Use facial, kinesics, body language, and other nonverbal clues to deciper
meaning. 6.
Develop and use battery of listening strategies, such as detecting key words, guessing the meaning of words from contexts, appealing for help,
and signalling comprehension or lack there of.
4. Listening Strategies
