The Purposes of Listening Listening Problems

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c. The Purposes of Listening

In addition to bottom-up and top-down processing, Richard 2002 considers two listening purposes. They are interactional and transactional functions of language. When language is used to fulfill an interactional communicative function, the focus is on creating harmonious interaction among individuals. It emphasizes the interaction among the participants. In other words, interactional function of language refers to the use of language for social. Examples of interactional functions are greeting, jokes, small talk, giving compliments, etc. While, transactional use focuses its attention on the content of the message. In other words, language is used or functioning as a mean of delivering accurate information Richard, 2002. Emphasis is on transferring information, and unlike interactional uses of language, it is important for the listeners to comprehend the content of the speaker’s message.

d. Listening Problems

When contemplating designing lessons and techniques for teaching listening components in them, a number of special characteristics of spoken language need to be taken into consideration. Foreign language learners need to pay special attention to such factors because they strongly influence the processing of speech, and can even block comprehension if they are not attended to Brown, 2001. In other words, they can make the listening process difficult. Rubin 1994 as quoted in Goh 2002 summarized the factors that influenced learners listening into five categories: text type, task, interlocutor, process and listening. 1 Text 12 Text types have a clear influence. There are some problems which might be faced by the learners, such as sentence length, difficult vocabulary, or even the unorganized information. Those problems can be overcome by providing adequate visual support to help the learners catch the text in context. However, Brown 2000 suggests that learners need to be able to comprehend language delivered in various rates of speed. 2 Tasks Factors that influence listening tasks might be the types of questions, the amount of time available to process the information, or whether the learners get the opportunity to have the information repeated or not. 3 Speaker Speakers can affect the listeners’ comprehension. Speaker characteristics that play a part include accent, fluency, standard or non-standard usage, and gender. This problem can be overcome by providing authentic recording of speaking. 4 Listeners Listeners’ characteristics that might influence comprehension include language proficiency, gender, memory, interest, knowledge, or purpose. 5 Process The types of processing that listeners engage in directly affect listening comprehension Goh, 2002. These refer to whether the process has been predominantly top down or bottom up, or an effective combination of both. In this study, the writer considers these five characteristics in designing a set of listening materials so that the problems that might occur while learners are listening can be overcome. 13

e. Listening Activities