11 or levels, and the output of each stage becomes the input for the next higher stage.
Bottom-up processing tends to rely on the text, in which the listeners rely on the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that created meaning. Another view
of listening process is top-down processing. Top-down processing emphasizes more the background knowledge of the listeners. Prior knowledge of a topic
enables listeners to interpret what they have heard and predict what will come next. Listening comprehension is mainly a top-down process in the sense that the
various types of knowledge involved in understanding language were applied in any order, or even simultaneously, and they are all capable of interacting and
influencing each other Buck, 2001: 3. Buck 2001 added, there are many reasons why the listening process may
go wrong. This could be due to the background noise, or distracted attention, or be thinking of something else. Moreover, for second-language listeners, they could
have other difficulties, such as unknown vocabulary, complex syntax, or the text could be just too fast.
2. Listening Comprehension
The researcher divides this section into three sub-sections, namely definitions of listening comprehension, listening comprehension skills, and the
importance of listening comprehension skills for EFL students.
a. Definitions of Listening Comprehension
Buck 2001: 3 simply pointed out that listening comprehension is the result of an interaction between a number of information sources, which include
the acoustic input, different types of linguistic knowledge, details of the context,
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12 and general world knowledge, and so forth, and listeners use whatever
information they already have in their mind, or whatever relevant information to help them interpret what the speaker is saying.
Caroll 1972, as cited by Buck 2001: 52, described listening comprehension as a two-stage process, namely the apprehension of the linguistic
information contained in the message, and the application of that linguistic information to the wider communicative context.
According to Anderson 1988, there are four relevant features of listening input which make comprehending materials difficult or easy for listeners. These
are information organization, familiarity of topic, explicitness of information, and type of input. First is the information organization. The information organization
deals with the information structure given to the listeners. This feature might be an ease or difficulty for the listeners so that the teacher should consider the way
information is ordered in factual text when producing or selecting material for the students.
Secondly is the familiarity of topic. This feature deals with the power of prior knowledge to interpret what the listeners heard and the failure of awareness
of the extent to which they were drawing on such knowledge. Anderson 1988: 49 cited what Hare and Devine 1983 found, that the amount of prior knowledge
of the topic of a story was a significant predictor of how much content the listener would recall. As Buck 2001 cited from Spilich et al.1979 and Pearson and
Johnson 1978 , if the topic of the text accords well with the listeners‟ world
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13 knowledge, then it will be much easier to understand than a text with a topic that
the listener knows about. The third feature is explicitness of information. There are three types of
explicitness found influencing the ease of comprehension according to Anderson 1988, namely: redundancy, sufficiency of information, and referring expressions.
Redundancy refers to the cues that the listeners have to select, which can be contrastive
–or only single feature mentioned, or redundant, in which there are two distinguished features mentioned. Sufficiency of information means the texts
contains all the relevant information and no more. Referring information is about the way a speaker chooses to refer to the people or objects he mentions, and the
effect of these choices on the listener‟s ease of comprehension. The last feature is the type of input. The type of input affects the degree of
comprehension difficulty. From an experimental research on teenagers, Brown and Yule 1983a have categorized spoken texts into three broad types; these are
static, dynamic, and abstract. The terms refer to the differences in the potential complexity of relationships between the things, people, events, and ideas referred
to by a speaker. In a static text, the focus is on describing an object or giving someone instructions on how to assemble a model, in which the relationship
between items is likely to be fixed. Dynamic use of language is needed in telling a story or recounting an incident. It is called dynamic because it will probably
involve shifts of scene and time, and even the characters and the relationship. Abstract texts focus on someone‟s ideas and beliefs rather than concrete objects,
for example someone‟s reason of choosing a particular school or university.
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14
b. Listening Comprehension Skills
