Therefore, some principles and components of listening are important to learn in order to improve the listening skill.
a. The Nature of Listening
Listening is a receptive skill. It requires people to receive and understand incoming information input. Since listening is receptive, people can listen to and
understand things at a higher level than people can produce. For this reason, people sometimes assume it as a passive skill. Unfortunately, this assumption is
not true. In fact, listening is very active. When people listen, they not only process what they hear but also connect it to other information they already know.
Meaning to say, they are “creating meaning” in their own minds by combining what they hear with their own ideas and experiences Nunan, 2003: 24.
b. Listening Process
There are two kinds of listening processes to comprehend the oral text. They are bottom up and top down processes. Bottom up processing is the use of
incoming data as a source of information about the meaning of the massage. The listeners digest the information they hear such as sounds, words, clauses, and
sentences so that they could obtain the meaning. Meanwhile, top down processing is the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of the massage.
The listeners use their prior knowledge about some topics, situations, characters, places or events to catch the meaning of what they listen Nunan, 2003: 26-27.
Nunan 2003: 28 points out that to be successful in listening does not merely depend on one of those kinds of processing. While bottom up processing
could help the learners to recognize the words and sentences they hear, top down PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
processing helps the learners to create the situations in their mind. Considering this matter, in developing listening materials, it is required to combine both
bottom up and top down processing.
c. Listening Problems
According to Goh 1999: 59 there are some problems that students usually face during Listening. The problems are categorized into three, namely the
problems related to perception, the problems related to parsing, and the problems related to utilization. The problem related to perception deal with recognizing
sounds as distinct words or group of words and also difficulty with attention. Parsing problems have mainly to do with various difficulties with developing a
coherent mental representation of words heard. In the utilization stage, the problems occur mainly related to the difficulties in understanding the intended
massage of the speaker and also difficulties in processing the text further because of lack of prior knowledge or inappropriate application of prior knowledge. To
have clear illustration of the problems, Goh 1999: 59 presents the summary of the problems that students usually encounter in listening comprehension. The
summary is presented in Table 2.1.
Table 2.1: Problems in Listening Comprehension
No. Perception Parsing
Utilization
1
2 Do not recognize the
words they know
Neglect the next part when thinking about
meaning Quickly forget what is
heard
Unable to form a mental representation of the
words heard Understand words but
not the intended message
Confused about the key ideas in the
message PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
3
4
5 Can’t chunk streams of
speech
Miss the beginning of the text
Concentrate too hard or unable to concentrate
Do not understand subsequent parts of input
because of earlier problems
d. Principles in Developing the English Listening Materials
