Definition of Listening The influence of computer assisted language learning on students' listening skill
presented by the speaker. According to Joseph P. Boyle, there are three factors that affect listening skill; Listener factors, Speaker factors, Material factors.
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a. Listener Factors
1. Experiencepractice in listening to target language
2. General intelligent
3. Physical and educational
4. Intellectual powers of analysis and selection, memory, etc
5. Psychological motivation and sense of purpose while listening,
attitude of listeners to the speaker, listener‟s attention and concentration
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b. Speaker Factors
1. Language ability of the speaker
2. Speaker‟s production: pronunciation, accent, variation, voice, etc.
3. Speed of delivery
4. Prestige and personality of the speaker
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c. Material Factors
1. The language used to convey the message; phonological features,
including stress, intonation, weak forms, syntax, cohesion and etc. 2.
Difficulty of content and concepts, especially if the material is abstract, highly specialized or technical, or lengthy.
3. Amount of support provided by gestures, visuals.
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Listening can cause problems as panic and difficulty. Students often panic when they see the tape recorder because they know that they are faced with a
challenging task. Two things are guaranteed to increase that panic, the first is to refuse to play more than once a
nd the second is to expose an individual student‟s
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Joseph P. Boyle, Factors Affecting Listening Comprehension, English Language Teaching, XXXVIII, 1984, p. 35.
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Ibid.,
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Ibid.,
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Ibid.,
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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