the same speed. Since every student has their own characteristics and abilities, there are students who can easily understand the listening materials and students who
have insufficient English abilities. There are students who can get the content in the first hearing and those who need to play it for two or three times. The last, students
cannot establish communication with the speakers since what they do is just listen to a tape.
3 Intensive Listening: Live Listening The main idea of live listening is that the activities are done by doing a direct
communication. So, there is a real communication done by the teacher and the students. The teacher can also bring a visitor to the classroom to engage a
conversation with the students. This type of activity also has its own advantages. The students are able to interrupt the speaker if they want to ask for clarification or
repetition. They can also ask the speaker to slow down or make the speed faster. This helps them to do the activity easier. However, there is one disadvantage for
using this type of listening procedure. The students sure are able to interfere with the speaker. However, in the real communication they will not always have the
opportunity to do so. It is possible to make their partner of communication annoyed because they are asked for repetition over and over.
e. Difficulties in Listening to English in an EFL Classroom
Wilson 2008:12 describes that there are four categories of difficulties in listening. These are:
1 Characteristics of the message Although students may know the written form of a word, it does not mean that
they can easily recognize the spoken form. There are quite many words which have similar pronunciation. We can take this sentence for an example “Mr. Clough from
Slough bought enough dough”. So, although they know the words, it is rather hard for them to pronounce it. Of course sometimes this is problematic to the listeners
because it can easily cause mishearing. There are also other linguistic difficulties that may occur in the listening activities such as unknown words, lexical density
short spaces of time between content words, and complex grammatical structures. Furthermore, there are still some non-linguistic characteristics of the message that
are potential to bring difficulties in the listening activity such as familiarity of the topic, text type, and cultural accessibility.
2 Characteristics of the delivery Mode of the delivery is divided into two categories namely reciprocal and non-
reciprocal listening. The first mode involves interaction between two or more people. So, there is a communication between the speaker and the listener. This
mode allows the listener to use ‘repair strategies’. Here the speaker can react to the look of confusion by backtracking and starting again. Meanwhile, the listener can
also take part by asking for clarification, asking the speaker to slow down, and so on.
On the other hand, the non-reciprocal listening does not give the opportunity for the listener to contribute to a dialogue. The examples of non-reciprocal listening
are listening to a radio and watching movies. The listeners have limited control to
the input. Unlike the reciprocal mode, the listener cannot influence some factors in listening such as the speed of the speaker, the vocabularies and grammar used, or
even asking for repetition to pronounce the difficult words. The limited control towards those factors makes this model to be regarded more difficult than reciprocal
listening. For addition, there are still some characteristics of delivery including organization, duration, number of speaker, and the last is accent.
3 Characteristics of the listener Every student has their own characteristics. One student may be hard to
concentrate, meanwhile another student can easily understand the materials given. Each of them has hisher own lacks and has something that they good at. According
to the Multiple Intelligent theory, people possess different kinds of intelligences such as linguistic, logical-mathematical, music, interpersonal, spatial, and so on. It
can be related to students learning strategies. Students with musical intelligent for example, prefer to learn a language through music. Other students who possess
different kinds of intelligent also follow a way that make them easier to learn. Another characteristic of the listeners is the age factor. Young learners are
different from adult learners in terms of their needs as listeners. These differences include shorter attention span, fewer cognitive abilities, difficulties concentrating
on disembodied voices and the importance of visual stimuli and effect, and familiarity and confidence with multimedia materials. It can become challenge for
teachers to develop materials for listening tasks.
