Types of Classroom Listening Performances
the input. Unlike the reciprocal mode, the listener cannot influence some factors in listening such as the speed of the speaker, the vocabularies and grammar used, or
even asking for repetition to pronounce the difficult words. The limited control towards those factors makes this model to be regarded more difficult than reciprocal
listening. For addition, there are still some characteristics of delivery including organization, duration, number of speaker, and the last is accent.
3 Characteristics of the listener Every student has their own characteristics. One student may be hard to
concentrate, meanwhile another student can easily understand the materials given. Each of them has hisher own lacks and has something that they good at. According
to the Multiple Intelligent theory, people possess different kinds of intelligences such as linguistic, logical-mathematical, music, interpersonal, spatial, and so on. It
can be related to students learning strategies. Students with musical intelligent for example, prefer to learn a language through music. Other students who possess
different kinds of intelligent also follow a way that make them easier to learn. Another characteristic of the listeners is the age factor. Young learners are
different from adult learners in terms of their needs as listeners. These differences include shorter attention span, fewer cognitive abilities, difficulties concentrating
on disembodied voices and the importance of visual stimuli and effect, and familiarity and confidence with multimedia materials. It can become challenge for
teachers to develop materials for listening tasks.
4 Characteristics of the environment Environmental condition also plays important role in the listening activities. If
the room is too hot, it can drive students sleepy and reduce their concentration. Background noise also affects the learning process. It can make them unable to
listen to the recording clearly because of the disturbance. Another factor is the equipment which supports the listening activities. Teachers have to make sure
whether the player or the speaker works well, otherwise it can become obstacles that will disturb the whole listening process.
There is actually one more factor that can be included as the factor that makes listening activities difficult although it cannot be categorized as one of the four
characteristics above. It is memory. During the listening process, the words flow continuously. After they hear one word, the other words will follow. This way, the
students are flooded with words. This can lead to overload and may cause the students to “switch off” unless they are well attuned to the rhythm and the flow of
the language. Actually, it is better for the students to understand what they hear rather than to memorize all of the inputs that come to their mind.
One thing related to memory is schema which is defined as listeners’ prior
knowledge. It is a mental knowledge based on a typical situation. So, eventhough the recording is not played completely, the listeners can guess what the speaker is
going to say according to the schema that they know before. This can be a good technique to reduce memory load. There are some ways to activate students’
schemata. Teachers can shows some pictures or asking questions related to the materials that they hear.