The Importance Of Second Language Listening

Introduction

In actuality, listening is a language skill that is not given as much importance as it should in second language teaching. It is common to find that most teachers do not implement activities that are specifically for the purpose of developing listening skills in students. Usually teachers in secondary schools will only focus on teaching by the textbook which does not give students enough opportunities to be exposed to authentic use of the language through input. The activities implemented in the second language classrooms also lack the opportunities for students to actually relate what they are learning to real-life situations in which they will need to use it. In other words, they are not meeting the students’ communicative

I had mentioned above that it is necessary for students to do something with the language that requires them to use it for real life purposes. A task is according to Richards, Platt & Platt,“an activity designed to help achieve a particular learning goal”. In the case of second language learning, it would be the mastery of the structures, forms or vocabulary, but also the meaning of the input that the listening activity provides. This is a rather simple definition, but it doesn’t mention what a good task should include for it to be efficient and motivating for students. Candlin includes these aspects by defining task as “one of a set of differentiated, sequenceable, problem-posing activities involving learners and teachers in some joint selection from a range of varied cognitive and communicative procedures applied to existing and new knowledge in the collective exploration and pursuance of foreseen or emergent goals within a social milieu”(Towards task-based language learning,

According to Brown (2006), “Top-down means using our prior knowledge and experiences; we know certain things about certain topics and situations and use that information to understand”. For example, when we are at a restaurant we already know that the waiter has to take our order first, then bring it to us, and later bring us the bill. By knowing this, even in a second language it makes it simple to figure out what to expect in the dialogue if we already know the