d. Teaching Listening and Speaking
The final product of this study is an appropriate interactive learning multimedia program of listening and speaking, the target users of the product
are the seventh grade students. They are categorized as beginner learners because English is formally taught to them started from this grade.
Nation and Newton 2009: 17 state that: The aims of a beginners course in listening and speaking are: 1 to
help the learners to be able to cope with meaning-focused input and meaning-focused output as soon as possible; 2 to motivate them in
their language study by getting them to engage in successful listening and speaking; and 3 to make the early learning as relevant as
possible to their language use needs.
They also present five principles that are particularly relevant to the teaching of beginners. The principles are:
1 Meaning Focus on meaningful and relevant language
2 Interest Maintain interest through a variety of activities
3 New language Avoid overloading learners with too much new
language 4 Understanding
Provide plenty of comprehensible input 5 Stress-free
Create a friendly, safe, cooperative environment Nation and Newton 2009: 19
2. Listening and Speaking
a. The Definition of Listening
Cameron 2001: 40 mentions that “listening can be seen as the active use of language to access other people’s meaning.” It is supported by Nation
and Newton 2009: 37 who say that listening was traditionally seen as a
passive process by which the listener receives information sent by a speaker. More recent models view listening as a much more active and interpretative
process. According to Brown 2001: 249, Listening is not a one-way street. It is not merely the process of a
unidirectional receiving of audible symbols. One facet–the first step- of listening comprehension is the psychomotor process of receiving
sound waves through the ear and transmitting nerve impulse to the brain. But that is just the beginning of what is clearly an interactive
process as the brain act on the impulses, bringing to bear a number of different cognitive and affective mechanisms.
It can be concluded that listening is a very complex process happened inside the brain. The first step is receiving sounds, and then the sounds waves
are transmitted to the brain. Thus, hearers can convey the messages.
b. Listening Processes
Two kinds of processes are involved in understanding spoken
discourse. These are often referred to as bottom-up and top-down processing.
1 Bottom-up processes According to Richards 2008: 4, “bottom-up processing refers to
using the incoming input as the basis for understanding the message.” Nation and Newton 2009: 40 state that “these are the processes the listener uses to
assemble the message piece-by piece from the speech stream, going from the parts to the whole.” Field 2003: 326 adds that “the signal is processed
through several levels: auditory-phonetic, phonemic, syllabic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, propositional, pragmatic and interpretive.”
2 Top-down processes According to Nation and Newton 2009: 40, “top-down processes
involve the listener in going from the whole to the parts.” Richards 2008: 7 says that “top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to the use of
background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message.” In these processes listener uses their prior knowledge to predict what the message will
contain, and uses parts of the message to confirm, correct or add to this. In real world listening, both bottom-up and top-down processing
generally occur together. Interactive multimedia developed in this study combined some listening activities in order to give students opportunities to
perform both bottom-up and top-down processes.
c. The Difficulties in Listening
Kategori