e To reinforce conceptual development. Some spoken texts such as stories is said that it can be used as a useful revision for reinforcing concepts such as numbers, size, and
cause and effect. f
To interact with others. Activities that encourage students to interact with others will make them to negotiate meanings by listening and asking questions, checking
meanings, agreeing, and so on. It is proof that communication cannot be done without listening. So, it means that listening is as important as speaking.
g To provide support for literacy. The teacher can give the students the task to make connections between spoken and written language by picking out written words which
are part of spoken message.
Peterson in Celce and Murcia 2001 states that in the beginning of students’
language learning, listening activities give them the opportunity to have direct connection to the meaning in the new language before they continue to learn to read.
b. Characteristics of Listening
Listening skill is different from the other skills. It has its own characteristics. Harmer 1998:98-99 states that there are special characteristics about listening. In
listening, the tapes go at the same speed. Since they hear the same thing, there will be no students who will complain that the recording that they hear is faster than that
of other students. Good listening materials should be similar to the actual language spoken by the native speakers, including the speed. So, providing students with
listening activities sharpen their ability to recognize English language in the actual speed.
Second, the learners cannot flick back just like what they do in the reading activities. The one who control the materials is the teacher, not the listeners. So, if
they do not want to be left behind, it is better for them to pay their attention on the recording carefully. It enables them to listen seriously in order to be able to
understand the content of the materials that they hear. Third is about the order to do the listening activities. At the first hearing, what the learners should do is listen for
the general understanding of the content. After that, they may move to concern for the details. They have to achieve the general comprehension first before returning
to listen for the specific details. This order makes them easier to catch the input. Third, there is a special thing about listening. When we are doing listening
activities, it means that we are listening to spoken language. Spoken language, especially when it is informal, has some unique features. Those are including the
use of incomplete utterances, repetitions, hesitations, and so on. It is different from written language which tends to have punctuation and complete utterances. The last
is listening activities enable the learners to experience informal spoken English along with the other spoken factors such as the tone of the voice, the intonation,
rhythm, and background noise.
c. Bottom-up vs Top-down approaches to listening
In listening activities, there are two approaches to describe the process. These are the bottom-up and top-down model. Wilson 2008 describes that the bottom-
up model emphasizes the decoding of the smallest unit, phonemes and syllables, to lead us towards meaning. Based on this model, listeners do the comprehension
activities and try to figure out the meaning depends on the sounds that they hear. For addition, Morley in Celce and Murcia 2001 also states the process of finding
the meaning is started from sounds to words, and then continued to the grammatical relationship, and ended in finding the lexical meanings.
Meanwhile, the top-down model emphasizes the use of background knowledge to predict the content. The knowledge of the listeners takes an important part of the
process. If they feel that the situation is familiar to them, they can predict what they
