Active Listening Listening Process

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CHAPTER II THEORETICAL REVIEW

A. Theoretical Description

The theoretical description includes a discussion of listening, instructional material design, materials development, and authentic materials. The theoretical description will discuss some theoretical principles underlying the design of instructional listening materials using the authentic material. Any approach to design of listening materials reflects a view of the nature of listening, that is active listening and the process it involves.

1. Listening

Listening plays an important role in language teaching since it exposes the students to the spoken language. This sub-chapter explores some aspects of listening, including the non-passive nature of listening, the way we normally process what we hear to make sense out of it, two purposes of listening, problems that learners usually deal with, teaching listening, listening activities and the materials for teaching listening.

a. Active Listening

Listening was labeled as a passive skill Widdowson, 1990. According to this concept, listeners are given the messages by the speakers. They do not have their own purpose in listening to the spoken language. This concept was rejected by 8 9 Gebhard 2000. In recent theories on language skills, listening is classified into receptive skill, and thus, is an active skill. Lynch 1996 states that in the listening process, the listeners involve their own purpose for listening, their expectations, and their own store of background knowledge. This statement clearly explains that listeners do not merely receive information or messages given by the speakers, but they also actively employ their mind as they are listening. Listeners listen to the messages conveyed then they process the messages on their own mind. They are starting to think how to respond. Active listening is even a part of our interpersonal communication, in which we pay attention to our own thoughts and ideas Gebhard, 2000. Not only when we participate in conversation with others, but also when we listen during one-way exchanges—for example, while listening to lectures, films, television news, and musicals—we are active. Let us take a person who is waiting for his flight in an airport for instance. While he is waiting for his flight, he needs information that is delivered by the announcer. He might listen the name of the airways, flight number, departure time, and the gate number. In this case, a listener determines his purposes in listening: that is to get the information about the departure time and the gate to get through, expects the information that he needs, i.e. the name of the airways and the flight number, and uses his store of background knowledge if he does not listen to every word that the speaker says.

b. Listening Process

Another aspect of listening is the way we process what we hear. When good listeners involve themselves with any type of spoken discourse, a number of 10 processes work on various levels simultaneously to produce an understanding of the incoming speech Gebhard, 2000. Furthermore, there are two distinct processes involved in comprehending spoken English. They are bottom-up processing and top- down processing. Richard 2002 defines bottom up processing as the use of incoming data as a source of information about the meaning of a message. Bottom up processing refers to a process of decoding a message that the listener hears through the analysis of sound, words, and grammar. In this process, listeners receive new information that they have not recognized before. The process of comprehension begins with the message received, which is analyzed at organized levels of sounds, words, clauses, and sentences, until the intended message is arrived. Different from bottom up processing, top down processing refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of message Richard, 2002. Top-down processing refers to using background knowledge to comprehend a message. In this process, listeners use their previous knowledge about the topic. The background knowledge can be in form of schemata, generally based on previous learning and life experience or plans about events also the combination of them. Then listeners comprehend the meaning by making correlation between what they hear with what are in their mind. This kind of background knowledge or schemata relates especially to listeners’ real-world experience. The schemata are drawn from including the experience in assigning specific kinds of interaction to an event, for example, knowing how to listen to jokes, stories, and request. Therefore background knowledge is obviously important when teachers consider the language processing problems of foreign students. 11

c. The Purposes of Listening