Importance Of Listening Comprehension

Listening is an important skill for the person who is learning English because in verbal communication we cannot communicate with each other without listening to the speaker’s utterances and understanding them. However, listening is a very demanding and challenging skill for the learners to master. Many students often encounter trouble in listening to foreign people even though they are doing well in the English classroom. According to Rubin (1995:8), “For second/foreign language learners, listening is the skill that makes the heaviest processing demands because learners must store information in short term memory at the same time as they are working to understand the information”. Furthermore, as she explains, “Whereas in reading learners can go over the text at leisure, they generally don’t have the opportunity to do so in listening”. As Broughton and et al (1988:65) claim it appears that listening is a passive skill, and speaking is an active one. This is not really true, since the decoding of a message (i.e. listening) calls for active participation in the communication between the participants. Krashen (1981) has claimed that comprehension plays a central – and possibly predominant part - in the whole process of language learning. Current approaches to the role of listening comprehension have their roots in the observation of two essential features of L1 acquisition. First, young children are typically allowed a ‘silent period’ in the early part of their lives, during