Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab Listening Skill

9 c. Situation Altman 1985: 89 stated that the situation which influences someone to perceive something may be the combination between someone’s past experience with his or her expectation. If someone had a bad experience in the past, he or she might perceive negatively when acquiring the same stimuli in advance. However, in case someone had a good experience in the past, he or she would have good expectation to achieve when similar things happen in the future. d. Self concept Self concept is the way we feel about and perceive something. The way we see ourselves will also affect our perception. A person has to maintain a relatively stable, positive self-concept. All those processes happen within an individual and involve the factor of subjectivity. This is the factor that causes each people to have different perception on particular things. Other factors that affect people in perceiving stimuli are their likes and dislikes, their experiences and their environments. Based on the explanation above, it can be concluded that everyone has his or her own view on something he or she experiences or feels in the environment. The same object or event can be perceived differently by different person which then lead to different behavioral response or attitudes. Related to this study, perception is the way how students feel or think about and considers something, in this case is the use of Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab in order to improve students’ listening skill. 10

2. Listening Skill

Listening is an attempt to discriminate sounds, understand vocabulary and grammatical structures, interpret stress and intention, retain and interpret information of audio stimuli Wipf, 1984. It implies that listening skill is human’s ability to interpret and understand the information in the form of audio. In this research listening skill refers to students ability to acquire and understand information from a certain source material used in a teaching-learning process. Listening has emerged as an important component in the process of second language acquisition Feyten, 1991. Wolven Coakley suggested that listening is an active process consisting of our components: the physiological process of receiving, attending or focused perception of selected stimuli, assigning meaning to the aural stimuli heard and attended, and remembering or storing aural stimuli for the future recall. Listening can be improved through training and practice Nichols and Stevens, 1983.

3. Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab

Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab is an online web in which people can access a lot of listening materials and exercises. Although the title of the web contains the word ‘ESL’, the creator Randall said that this web can be used by anyone from any place in the world to improve their listening skill. At first Randall made this web to be used as learning media for his students, but along the development of this web, Randall started to introduce this web to other people. This web became very popular and now even people in EFL countries might use it