Technique in Teaching Listening

4. Difficulties in Teaching Listening

There are many difficulties in teaching listening and become the problems for teacher to solve it. While listening, usually learners need to hear things more than once, this problem happen too many learners due to their concentrate or their understanding. Teaching listening, especially English has Foreign Language need to pay special attention to some factor that they strongly influence the speech process, and can usually prevent comprehension if they are not attended to and can make its process difficult. These are the following characteristics of spoken language that make listening process difficult and usually detectable in teaching listening itself, quoted from Brown which is adopted from several sources. 1. Clustering: attending to appropriate “chunks” of language – phrases, clauses, constituent. 2. Redundancy: recognizing the kinds of repetitions, rephrasing, elaborations, and insertions that unrehearsed spoken language often contains, and benefiting from that recognition. 3. Reduced Forms: understanding the reduced forms that may not have been a part of English learner‟s past learning experience in classes where only formal “textbook” language has been presented. 4. Performance Variables: being able to “weed out” hesitations, false starts, pauses, and corrections in natural speech. 5. Colloquial Language: comprehending idioms, slang, reduced forms, shared cultural knowledge. 6. Rate of Delivery: keeping up with the speed of delivery, processing automatically as the speaker continuous. 7. Stress, Rhythm and Intonation: correctly understanding prosodic elements spoken language, which is almost always much more difficult than understanding the smaller phonological bits and pieces. 8. Interaction: managing the interactive flow of language from listening to speaking to listening, etc. 11 After seeing the problem above it can be concluded that those problems were caused by students‟ less of concentration in understanding and getting the information from the sound. Further the use of video in teaching listening is expected can ease those problems because video helps learner‟s comprehension in learning listening. According to Carla Meskill she states that audio and visual are integrated each other to make language understandable. In line with that Carla also states that the use of video in teaching listening can present language more powerful, more salient, and more comprehensible input than other media for second and foreign language students. 12 Furthermore, Susan Stempleski and Barry Tomalin stated that video is the combination of moving picture and sound which can present language comprehensively. 13 Therefore, teaching listening 11 H. Douglas Brown, Language Assessment: Principle and Classroom Practices, New York: Longman, 2004, p. 122. 12 Carla Meskill, Listening Skills Development Through Multimedia,New York: University at Albany,1995,P.184 13 Stempleski, Susan and Tomalin, Barryy,Video In Action Recipes For Using Video In Language Teaching,Sydney: Prentice Hal,1990,p.3 com prehension by using descriptive video will presumably affect learners‟ comprehension score because the video can improve learners‟ understanding. Besides that from those following above video materials can be a learning alternative because they contain dialogues from highly proficient English speakers, which could contribute to an easier understanding of their pronunciation. Material is collected from English TV series, movies, advertising, could increase student´s motivation, as Van Duzerin Lady Jhoana Arteaga 1998 claims that students listen to relevant and interesting things for them which keep their motivation and attention high. In line with that as a good teacher we have to make a good selection of video materials to expose learners to the suitable materials that facilitate their learning. In addition, by using authentic material as watching video, students can reduce these difficulties because usually visual and audio are integrated each other to make language understandable. So that, by using descriptive video as teaching media in teaching listening, hopefully students can improve their listening ability.

B. VIDEO

1. Definition of Video

Video according to Oxford Learner‟s Pocket Dictionary video is type of magnetic tape used for recording moving pictures and sound. 14 Susan Stempleski and Barry Tomalin argued that video is the combination of moving 14 Oxford pocket dictp.493. picture and sound which can present language comprehensively 15 . Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion. From the descriptive above, the author defines descriptive video as several storage formats for moving pictures that contain description of people, place or historical building. Briefly, also define as the videos that contain description things. As multimedia technology video becomes more accessible to teachers and learners of other languages, its potential as a tool to enhance listening, hopefully becomes new strategy in teaching listening. Video allows integration of text, graphics, audio, and motion video in a range of combinations. According to Carla Meskill “video is widely considered more powerful, more salient, and more comprehensible than other media for second and foreign language students”. 16 In line with that Brooks said “multimedia systems with video under learner control are also preferred other instructional activities”. 17 In short, multimedia input such as video as an authentic material apparently motivates learners and engages their attention to aural input. 15 Stempleski, Susan and Tomalin, Barryy,Video In Action Recipes For Using Video In Language Teaching,Sydney: Prentice Hal,1990,p.3 16 Carla Meskill,Listening Skills Development Through Multimedia,New York:University at Albany,1995,P.184 17 Brooks et.al. in Carla Meskill, Listening Skill Development Through Multimedia,New York:University at Albany,1995p.185