IMPROVING LISTENING COMPREHENSION
FOR BETTER ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING[1]
By: Syahrul
“The God gives us two ears and only one tongue
in order that we may hear more and speak less.” Diogenes Laertius
"we can expect to listen
twice as much as we speak, four times more than we read, and five times more
than we write." (Morley, 1991: 82)
Listening
is the basis for the development of all other skills and the main channel
through which the student makes initial contact with the target language and
its culture. Through active listening, students acquire vocabulary and syntax,
as well as better pronunciation, 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.
A. What
Is Listening Comprehension
Rost,
M. (2002: 43) define as the process of receiving what the speaker actually says
(receptive orientation); constructing and representing meaning (constructive
orientation); negotiating meaning with the speaker and responding
(collaborative orientation); and, creating meaning through involvement,
imagination and empathy (transformative orientation). In general, the
experts describe as the ability to
recall and understand information which is presented orally.” This information
might be presented through a book, filmstrip, video, felt board set.
We can
understand that listening is a complex,
active process of interpretation in which listeners match what they hear with
what they already know. It is an invisible mental process, making it difficult
to describe. Listeners must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary
and grammatical structures, interpret stress and intention, retain and
interpret this within the immediate as well as the larger socio-cultural
context of the utterance
B.
The objectives of Listening
Comprehension
The
main objective of listening comprehension
: the students learn how to listen 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.
C.
Problem In listening comprehension
According
to Yagang (1994), the problems in listening relate to four factors: the message, the speaker, the
listener and the physical setting. Furthermore, a numbers of research have been
carried out to pick out the problem in listening. The problems were believed to
cause by the speech rate, vocabulary and pronunciation (Higgins, 1995).
As
Flowerdew & Miller (1996) assumed that the problems of the students were
for the speed of delivery, new terminology and concept, difficulty in focusing
and the physical environment. As Nguyen Ngoan stated in his article “listening
to VOA: advantages, problems and solutions” the students have to face these
three problems. First, the students have no background knowledge about what
they are listening. The second problem is the unfamiliar, uninteresting and too
long listening which makes the students feel strange, discouraged and bored of
what they are hearing. The last one is
about the sound connections and intonation spoken by native speakers
with different accents.
In general, The Problem found in the classroom are :
·
I
have trouble catching the actual sounds of the foreign language.
·
I
have to understand every word; if I miss something, I feel I am failing and get
worried and stressed.
·
I
can understand people if they talk slowly and clearly; I can’t understand fast,
natural native-sounding speech.
·
I
need to hear things more than once in order to understand.
·
I
find it difficult to ‘keep up’ with all the information I am getting, and
cannot think ahead or predict.
·
If
the listening goes on a long time I get
tired, and find it more and more difficult to concentrate.
Before listening comprehension, the
learner should be aware of the different types of listening objective. or
decide what your purpose is. There are
different types of listening:
- Listening for gist: you listen in order to understand the main idea of the text.
- Listening for specific information: you want to find out specific details, for example key words.
- Listening for detailed understanding: you want to understand all the information the text provides.
D. Activities in listening Comprehension
There are three main steps in
listening comprehension. They are pre-listening stage, while-listening
stage and post-listening stage.
1. The pre-listening stage
This
is a stage where students do some activities before they listen to the text.
Underwood (1990:28) states that ‘it is unfair to plunge the students straight
into the listening text, even when testing rather than teaching listening
comprehension, as this makes it extremely difficult for them to use the natural
listening skills (which we all use in our native language) of matching what
they hear with what they expect to hear and using their previous knowledge to
make sense of it.’(Underwood, 1990: 30)
Therefore, before listening, the students should be
‘tuned in’ so that they know what to expect, both in general and for particular
tasks.
2. The While-Listening Stage
The
while-listening stage is a stage where the students are asked to do some
activities during the time that the students are listening to the text. The
purpose of the while listening activities is to help the learners develop the
skills of eliciting messages from the spoken language. Good while-listening
activities help learners find their way through the listening text and build
upon the expectations raised by pre-listening activity. (Underwood, 1990: 45)
3. The post-listening stage
Post-listening
activities are activities related to a particular listening text, which are
done after the listening is completed. Some post-listening activities are
extensions of the work done at the pre-listening and while-listening stages and
some relate only loosely to the listening text itself. Post-listening
activities can be much longer than while-listening activities because at this
stage the students
E. Listening Strategy
There are two strategies generally involved in listening comprehension.
1.
Bottom
– up Listening Strategies Bottom up strategy is to know about
details and segments. It concentrates on forms and structure. Thus, this
activity is more related with academic study. English learning students use
this activity to enhance their listening ability. Dictation and listening tests
are included in this. In class, ‘fill in the blank/s’ activity can increase
students’ awareness of forms.
However, bottom-up
strategy doesn’t mean that it excludes all authentic things. When we need deep
concentration on details, we use this activity. For example, weather forecast,
phone number and advertisement having implied meaning need special focus on
details to understand. Besides, tongue twists can be a good exercise for
students to notice subtle difference in various English forms and
pronunciation.
2.
Top
- Down Listening Strategies refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of the
message. Background knowledge Consists of context, the situation and topic, and
co-text (what came before and after). This background knowledge activates a set
of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and
anticipate what will come next.
This strategy focuses on content. Students can predict the
content of listening activity beforehand and use various materials such as
pictures and key words to understand the meaning. This strategy is more broad
approach than bottom- up and related with daily lives. When we watch drama or movie,
we usually focus on whole meaning, not structure or forms. Likewise, we listen
to news programs to grasp overall content and music by understanding the whole
meaning. Some people do these activities by using bottom-up strategy, but this
is rare case. The materials that can be used in top- down are prevalent.
Teachers can use authentic information. When students listen to real-life
story, it can increase their interest and make them think about main idea more
seriously.
Successful listening depends on the
ability to combine top-down and bottom-up processing. Activities which work
separately should help students to combine top- down and bottom-up processes to
become more effective listeners in real-life or longer classroom listening.
F. Suggestions for improving your
listening skills
Before you listen
- Think about the topic of the text you are going to listen to. What do you already know about it? What could possibly be the content of the text? Which words come to mind that you already know? Which words would you want to look up?
- If you have to do a task on the listening text, check whether you have understood the task correctly.
- Think about what type of text you are going to listen to. What do you know about this type of text?
- Relax and make yourself ready to pay attention to the listening text.
While you are listening
- It is not necessary to understand every single word. Try to ignore those words that you think are less important anyway.
- If there are words or issues that you don't understand, use your general knowledge as well as the context to find out the meaning.
- If you still don't understand something, use a dictionary to look up the words or ask someone else for help.
- Focus on key words and facts.
- Take notes to support your memory.
- Intonation and stress of the speakers can help you to understand what you hear.
- Try to think ahead. What might happen next? What might the speakers say, which words might they use?
After listening
- Think about the text again. Have you understood the main points?
- Remember the speculations you made before you listened. Did they come true?
- Review your notes.
- Check whether you have completed your task correctly.
- Have you had any problems while listening? Do you have any problems now to complete your task? Identify your problems and ask someone for help.
- Listen again to difficult passages.
G. CONCLUSION
Listening is vital not only in language learning but also in
daily communication. However, the students seem to have problems with
listening. the most common problems, the time they spend to listening is limited, their knowledge and motivation to
move themselves is too little as well the inappropriate strategies of learner.
they would be a hindrance for their listening comprehension. students
themselves should have much more exposure to variety of listening.
Simultaneously, they should learn the tips or strategies through each of their
learning themselves. The most important one, is practice. Space more time to do
listening comprehension for English material.
H. Sites
for listening comprehension Materials
Relates to the development of the
technology, to train the listening
comprehension, learners or students can take advantages from the existence
of Internet. Some Sites that can be used
to find the materials
www.ebookee.com www.voa.com
www.Ebook3000.com www.eslfast.com
www.soehaarrr.com. www.talkenglish.com
http://www.dailyesl.com and so on
References:
Brown, G. (1992). Listening to
Spoken English. London: Longman Press.
Flowerdew, J. and Miller, L.
(1996). Student perceptions, problems and strategies in second language lecture
comprehension RELC Journal 23 (2), 60–80.
Higgins, J.M.D. (1995) Facilitating listening
in second language classrooms through the manipulation of temporal variables.
Doctoral thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury.
Morley, J. (1991). Listening
comprehension in second/foreign language instruction. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.),
Teaching English as a second or foreign language (pp. 81-106). Boston, MA:
Heinle & Heinle.
Rost, M. (2002). Listening in
language research. London: Longman.
Some sites in internet
[1]
Delivered in Language Seminar for
Student of English Department In STAIN Bukittinggi,. November 2014
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