The Nature of Listening Listening Processes

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a. The Nature of Listening

Listening is one of the skills that become the basic skill in learning the foreign language. In language teaching, listening refers to a complex process that allows us to understand spoken language Rost, 2001: 7. Rost 2001: 11 added that “making listening materials needs a good understanding of effective teaching that includes careful selection of sources, creative listening materials design, continuous assistance, and integration of listening with other skills.” As stated by Rost, listening should be integrated with other skills in the real life. For example, we must have a basic knowledge of pronunciation obtained from listening to the dialogue so that we can produce good sentences when we want to read. Moreover, we must be able to listen to someone if we want to write hisher speech. Furthermore, in order to develop suitable listening materials, the designer should consider the selection of the materials including the difficulties and the materials’ authenticity.

b. Listening Processes

There are two kinds of listening processes. They are bottom up and top down processes. Bottom-up processing refers to “a process by which sounds are used to build increasing larger units of information” Goh, 2002: 5. In this process, listeners start with words, clauses, sentences before the aural input is understood. Top-down processing is the opposite of bottom-up processing. Top-down processing refers to “the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message” Richards as cited in Martalinova, 2002: 29. In this process, the listeners start from their background knowledge, such as general 23 information based on previous learning and life experience. The listeners use the background knowledge to analyze, interpret, and store information. Eysenck as cited in Goh, 2002: 6 stated that both bottom-up and top-down processing now occur at the same time. Listening does not always use top-down or bottom-up processing only, but one type of processing might take precedence over the other. It depends on the amount of practice an individual has had on a particular task. As an example, in listening to a speech about HIVAIDS, students will use their background knowledge to analyze the speech and catch the meaning of words and sentences to obtain new information about HIVAIDS. By using top- down and bottom-up processing together at the same time, learners will get more benefits in improving their listening skill.

c. Types of Listening Comprehension Task