Types of Texts Theory of Reading

27 listening skill. Background knowledge will make the students easier to understand the message of what they listen to. It will also raise their motivation to listen. Therefore, lack of background knowledge may cause ineffective listening. Hence, prior knowledge is very significant in helping students construct new knowledge. Prior knowledge gives contributions to the students in building a new understanding while learning in the classroom. Brownell 1996: 10 believes that prior knowledge contributes successful learning. He says that in order to learn new knowledge, people in fact need prior knowledge. In other words, people need to relate information they already possess to the new materials that is going to be learned in order to construct new knowledge Brown, 1994: 79. Prior knowledge which is well constructed before learning a new material offers contributions to the students in the learning process Brownell, 1996: 10. For this reason, prior knowledge also needs to be constructed to the students in learning listening skill. Students’ prior knowledge should have been well constructed when they enter the class to start the new materials. Constructing students’ prior knowledge becomes hard since the time of learning is very limited. Thus, the present study tries to investigate the effort of constructing prior knowledge to prepare them in listening section. Due to the limited time of listening section in the classroom, the students construct prior knowledge by reading the given texts from the teacher at home. Reading texts, which are commonly used by the students in learning, are in fact significant in helping them to construct background knowledge. Hence, the employed texts are authentic. They can be appropriate for the students as they help the students to be well-prepared in listening 28 section. Besides, it is important to note that the topic of the given reading text is similar to that of the listening material. Therefore, the reading texts facilitate the students to comprehend the listening material they listen to in the classroom. However, different students may perceive the implementation of reading text as pre- listening material in different ways. The students may perceive the pre-listening material positively and read the text before the listening section, or they may also perceive it negatively and are not willing to read the text before the listening section. Furthermore, the reading texts also provide the students with linguistic inputs which may be encountered in the listening texts. As a result, through reading text, the students are able to easily comprehend the listening materials. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI