lack of success in the listening task. Some teachers and students find that listening to tapes is extremely difficult, especially when tapes are fairly long.
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These are some internal factors that might be faced by the students in understanding listening process:
a. Intelligence; level of intelligence can influence the students‟ listening
comprehension. The students who have a high level of intelligence will better understand the listening material than the lower level one.
b. Language facility; the ability to segment and analyze speech accurately
and automatically into appropriate units is very important when listening to spoken language.
c. Vocabulary; the students must have knowledge of vocabulary because
some words not only have one meaning but have many meanings depend on the context. It can make the students easier in understand the material.
d. Background knowledge; the students who have lack of background
knowledge of the material can influence their comprehension in listening. e.
Speech register; Speech registers refer to the different styles of language a person uses in a given social context.
A range of internal factors influence listening comprehension. By considering these factors, people can analyze communication situations. This is an important
step in detecting possible causes of poor listening comprehension.
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4. Teaching Listening
To ensure a success in the teaching of listening, a teacher needs to plan and implement appropriate procedures and activities for the teaching.
a. Procedures and activities
There are three steps in listening activities. They are pre-listening, while- listening and post-listening.
Field summarized the format of the 1990‟s listening lesson as follows: Pre-listening
: Set context
13
Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching New Edition New York: Longman Publishing, 1991, p. 231.
14
Ina Thomas and Brian Dyer, Op.Ccit., pp. 3 –4.
Create motivation While-listening
: Extensive listening followed by questions on context attitude
Pre-set taskpre-set question Intensive listening
Checking answers Post-listening
: Examining functional meaning Inferring vocabulary meaning
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In pre listening, the teacher needs to activate students‟ knowledge of the topic;
giving them the purpose of the listening material so they can make predictions to anticipate what they might hear and giving them the new vocabulary. While
listening is the process of listening, the teacher give the material with the support of visual and clarification questions and then teacher checking the students
comprehension. The last is post listening, in this steps teacher follow up the activity based on new language.
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There are two types of listening activities according to Richard, they are noticing activities and restructuring activities.
Noticing activities involve returning to the listening texts that served as the basis for comprehension activities and using them as the basis for language
awareness. For example, students can listen again to a recording in order to: 1.
Identify differences between what they hear and a printed version of the text.
2. Complete a cloze version of the text.
3. Complete sentences stems taken from the text.
4. Check off entries from a list of expressions that occurred in the text.
Restructuring activities are oral or written tasks that involve productive use of selected items from the listening text. Such activities could include:
1. Paired reading of the tape scripts in the case of conversational texts.
2. Written sentence-completion tasks requiring use of expressions and other
linguistic items that occurred in the text. 3.
Dialog practice that incorporates items from the text.
15
John field, The Changing Face of Listening, English Teaching Professional, January 1998, p. 245.
16
Vera Savic, Developing Language Skills in Teaching English to Young Learners: Listening and Speaking.
