TEACHING LISTENING

CHAPTER I

1. Background

Listening is the basis for the development of all other skills and the main
channel through which the students makes initial contact with the target language
and its culture. Trought active listening, students acquire vocabulary and syntax,
as well as better prounounciation. Accent and intonation. Though listening skill is
very important, for some language learners it is considered to be the most difficult
language skill. Communication happens if there is an interaction between the
speaker and the listener. Therefore, listening comprehension activities have a
direct and important relationship to the amount and quality of speaking skill.
Successful listening for language learners depends on many factors such as the
knowledge of the language, background knowledge etc. To improve objective of
listening comprehension practice in junior high schoollevel is that the students
should learn to function successfully in real life situations. In detail, the purpose of
listening activity is that the students are able to do the instruction or to gain
information from different kinds of listening texts or genres. (for example;
monolog: speech, reports, instruction, poems, songs, etc, and dialog: debate,
discussion, movie etc). Moreover, they are able to complete the information and
respond to questions. To reach the goals, the teacher should consider several
things, such as students’ motivation, interest and learning style.

2. Limitation of problem

The limitation of problem of this paper are:

a. What is listening?
 b. What is the background of teaching listening ?
c. What are the five principles for teaching listening?
d. What are the technique and tasks in classroom of teaching listening?
e. How is listening in classroom?

1. Purpose of paper

Relate to the limitation of problem of this paper, the purposes of this paper
are:

a. To know what listening is.

b. To know about the background of teaching listening.
c. Knowing the five principles for teaching listening.
d. To know how does the technique and tasks in classroom of
teaching listening.
e. To know the process of listening in classroom?
 CHAPTER II

1. What is listening?
Every day we listen to many different things in many different
ways.Whether it is conversation with a colleague, the TV news, or a new music
CD, we listen. In our native language at least, we seem to automatically know
“how to listen” and “what we are listening for.” To language learners, listening is
far more challenging. In this chapter, we will explore how listening works and
ways to help learners become more effective listeners.
Listening is an active, purposeful process of making sense of what we
hear. Language skills are often categorized as receptive or productive. Speaking
and writing are the productive skills. Listening, along with reading, is a receptive
skill. That is, it requires a person to receive and understand incoming information
(input). Because listening is receptive, we can listen to and understandthings at a
higher level than we can produce. For this reason, people sometimes think of it as
a passive skill. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Listening is very active.
As people listen, they process not only what they hear but also connect it to other
information they already know. Since listeners combine what they hear with their
own ideas and experiences, in a very real sense they are “ creating the meaning”
in their own minds. As Buck (1995) points out, the assumption that listeners
simply decode messages is mistaken, “ (M)eaningis not in the text (text =
whatever is being listened to)—but is something that is constructed by listeners
based on a number o f different knowledge sources.” Among those sources are
knowledge of language, o f what has already been said, of context, and general
background knowledge. Listening is meaning based. When we listen, we are
normally doing so for a purpose. You might even say we don’t listen to words, we
listen to the meaning behind the words. Listening is often compared to reading,
the other receptive skill. While the two do share some similarities, two major
differences should be noted from the start. Firstly, listening usually happens in
real time. That is, people listen and have to comprehend what they hear
immediately. There is no time to go back and review, look up unknown words,
etc. Secondly, although listeningisreceptive,itvery often happens in the midst of a
conversation— something which requires productive, spoken responses. To
understand how listening works and how to teach it more effectively, sart by
thinking about your own listening.
2. Background to teaching Listening

Historically, learning a foreign language meant learning to read andwrite.

Listening was virtually ignored. Then, in the late 1800s, interest inusing children’s
learning of their first language as a model for foreign languageteaching grew. One
of the results was Gouin’s series method. It featuredaction and oral presentation of
new language in which the teacherwould make a series of statements (thus the
name of the method), and wouldcarry out the actions so that students could map
what they saw on to whatthey heard.
“I walk to the door. I walk.
I draw near to the door. I draw near.
I draw nearer to the door. I draw nearer.
I get to the door. I get to.
I stop at the door. I stop.”
(Titone, 1968, cited in Richards and Rodgers, 2001)
This is important since it represents the first time listening played a
keyrole in language teaching methodology. Later, the reform movement promoted
ideas such as the teaching of spoken, as opposed to written, language and that
learners should hear language before seeing it in written form. Still later, the
direct method, often associated with Charles Berlitz, promoted the teaching of
listening comprehension and the idea that new teaching points should be
introduced orally.
In the years following World War II, the audiolingualmethod came to
dominate foreign language teaching. The method, which was heavily influencedby
the behavioral psychology of the day, emphasized M IM/M
EM(mimicry/memorization) o f new structures. As in the direct method, these
were presented orally, before the learner saw the written form. The popularity of
the audiolingual method paralleled the establishment of language laboratories for
dialogue and pattern practice drills. (For a description of theaudio/lingual class,
see Nunan, Chapter 8, this volume.)
In the 1970s and early 1980s, the introduction of communicative
languageteaching-the idea the student learns though the act of communication-
increased the role of listening. During this period, Stephen Krashen’sinput
hypothesis made a major impact on language teaching. The inputhypothesis says
that, “for language learning to occur, it is necessary for the learner to understand
input language which contains linguistic items that are slightly beyond the
learner’s present linguistic competence. Learners understand such language using
cues in the situation.” (Richards, et al., 1985) Put simply, we acquire language by
meeting language that is a bit higher than our current level. Listening was seen as
a major source of comprehensible input.
Language learning textbooks began including listening activities that were
notsimply presentation o f language to be produced. They were listening activities
for input, the beginning of the kinds of listening tasks common in books today.

3 Classroom techniques and tasks

1. Intensive Listenig Task (Tugas menyimak intensif)

a. Distinguishing phonemic pairs (Membedakan dua fonem)

b. Distinguishing morphological pairs (Membedakan dua

morfologi)

c. Distinguishing stress patterns (Membedakan pola penekanan)

d. Paraphrase recognition (Pengenalan parafrase)

e. Repetition (Pengulangan)

2. Responsive listening task (Tugas menyimak responsif)

a. Question: mc response (Pertanyaan multiple choise)

b. Question: open-ended response (Pertanyaan essai)

c. Simple discourse sequences (Rangkaian percakapan ringan)

3. Selective listening task (Tugas menyimak selektif)

a. Listening cloze (Mengisi titik)

b. Verbal information Transfer (menjawab secara verbal)

c. Piture-cued information transfer (memilih gambar)

d. Sentence repetition (pengulangan kalimat)

4. Extensive listening task (tugas ekstensif listening)

a. Dictation (dikte)

b. Dialogue (mendengarkan dialog: pertanyaan )

c. Dialogue (mendengarkan dialog: pertanyaan essai)

d. Lecture (mencatat)

e. Interpretive task (mendengar puisi, mengira” arti)

f. Stories, narratives (menceritakan kembali)5.

Listening in the classroom

In this section, we will return to the activities profiled earlier in this

chapter
and look specifically at how they are used in the classroom. In the process, we
will note a few extra techniques teachers sometimes employ. In each case, the
listening task itself is the second step in the activity. The learners do a
prelistening, which serves to activate the top-down and bottomupschema. Each
activity is followed with a speaking activity. As mentioned earlier, although
listening is a different skill than speaking, they often go hand-in-hand. Also,
students often come to our classes to learn to speak. Listening can be a good way
to preview a speaking activity and speaking, in turn, can be useful to expand on
wrhat they’ve listened to. A balance of listening and speaking activities (and,
depending on the class, reading and writing) can be important to maintain learner
engagement. In the “Your story” dictation activity, the students will be working
withadjectives. The prelistening task is to have the students work in pairs. The
teacher gives them a series of adjectives that could have more than one opposite.
For example, the opposite o f “right” could be either “wrong” or “left.” Other
adjectives with more than one antonym include “hard,” “ smart,” “ sweet,” “
straight,” “ free,” etc. Learners see how many opposites they can think of.
Providing the adjectives gives them support-as opposed to just saying, “How
many adjectives can you think of?” It also focuses them on meaning, rather than
just grammar. They are thinking about descriptions—just w'hatthey will need to
do in the main task. The follow-up speaking activity for
“Your story” is clear. Students, having created their own version of the story,
usually want to compare their images with their partners. The prelistening task for
the doctor/patient activity both elicits information from the students and presents
new information. The students see a cartoon of several obviously ill people in a
doctor’s waiting room. They identify what is wrong with the people. Then they
are presented with a list of several symptoms and illnesses that the students may
not know in English (appendicitis, rash, etc.). They look up the words they don’t
know, thenmatch the symptoms to the illnesses. This is a useful example of
activating their background knowledge while preteaching vocabulary at the same
time. Once the students have completed the main task in their books, the teacher
might elicit answers from the students and w'rite them on the board. At this point,
the teacher may want to have the learners choose their own level of support of a
final listening:
I Extract 1
Teacher: OK, we’ll listen to this one more time. Please choose how you
want to listen.
If this was kind of difficult, watch me. I’ll point to the answers
just before they say them (on the recording).
Or if you don’t need my help spotting the answers, watch your
book. Try to catch the answers as they say them.
Or if it wasn’t difficult at all, close your eyes. Listen. Imagine the
people. What do they look like? Where are they? Watch the
“movie” in your mind.

This final listening serves several purposes. It gives students a new

taskalbeita simple one-and thus a new reason to listen. It also lets them choose the
amount o f support they want or don’t want. Finally, for those who choose the
third option, it encourages imagination.
The doctor/patient listening activity is followed by group work in which
learners brainstorm a list o f things they do to stay healthy. Then they exchange
lists with another group and compare. This activity allows them to make use of
the ideas and language from the warm-up and the listening, and to personalize the
task by relating the information to their own lives.
In the sign activity, learners guess the meaning before they listen. Bydoing
so, they are activating their previous (top-down) knowledge: the likely meaning of
the sign based on other signs they know. It also puts them in touch with
vocabulary and phrases, bottom-up information. And the fact that they have to
commit to an answer often increases student interest. It’s like they make a bet with
themselves about the meaning. They listen to see if they win the bet. As they
listen, the teacher could suggest pair work, either to the whole class or to lower-
level students. It was pointed out earlier that “How did you know?” is just as
important as getting the correct answer on inference activities. By working in
pairs, students are more likely to take the time to analyze their listening process.
Another reason for doing the activity in pairs has to do with making the task
easier. Students tend to focus on different parts of the listening and listen in
different ways. By working in pairs, they tend to understand the listening more
quickly. This idea can be used with nearly any sort of listening where there are
specific correct answers.
In considering these activities in the classroom, the flow suggested below
is often a useful way to structure a lesson plan to include listening:
1. A warm-up activity that integrates top-down and bottom-up data
2. A main listening task
3. A speaking task related to the previous task
Over the length of a course, the listening tasks should be balanced to
include a variety o f listening types and tasks. It is often useful to decide on
the listening task before planning the warm-up. Often, the task itself will
determine the kind of information you want to elicit or preteach through the
warm-up. Student speaking tasks often take place in pairs or small groups and
require learners to listen and respond to each other.

CHAPTER III

This chapter started by emphasizing listening as an active, purposefulprocess. It

involved processing information based on both overall top-down schema and the
bottom-up “building blocks” of language such as vocabulary and grammar.
Prelistening tasks are suggested as ways to integrate a learner’sprocessing. I also
considered text difficulty, authenticity, and the use of strategies. Exposing
learners to a variety o f tasks, as well as different types of listening, is helpful in
enabling them to become more skillful listeners. To that end, examples of how to
incorporate these ideas into the classroom and ways to modify textbook tasks are
provided. If we do these things, our learners can become more effective, active
listeners.

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