Listening Skills Essay

Listening comprehension is one of the important skills that learners must master for communicating in English. Without good listening comprehension skill, learners will find difficulties when they engage in the daily conversation using English. However, eventhough every learners knows that listening comprehension is an important skill, many of them do not feel determined to hone it. The possible cause might be the tedious learning atmosphere in the class.
Being a student who attended the listening comprehension class, I felt the atmosphere of learning was dreary. That is because the activities of learning process only focus on playing the tape recorder and answering the question. This kind of activity brought an unsatisfying result for me

In English faculty, the Listening subject trains us to be a native listener of English language. Based on my experience, most of the materials for listening class are obsolete, for some this will not be a problem, but for others it may be a problem. Buck once stated that when we are listening, it is not the same like reading, we not only pay attention to the sound, but we also have to pay attention to several factors, such as the environment must be quiet enough, the quality of the taped sound, the intonation and sounds of the words spoken must be clear, we as listeners need more comprehend input than reader, reading only need text. “Listeners, unlike readers, need to comprehend spoken language; therefore, they must pay attention to additional factors that can complicate the process of listening comprehension considerably in comparison to reading and render it more cognitively demanding (Buck,

According to Littlewood (1981), listening is not a passive skill because it requires listeners’ active roles to assemble the speaker’s message and interpret the meaning of the message based on the listener’s linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge. Therefore, Littlewood goes even farther that the meaning of the message could have different meaning for each individual. Rost states that listening is a complex process which consists of: “a 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)”. (as cited in Vandergrift, 2002). Similarly to Littlewood and Rost, Kline (1996) also defines listening as a skill that different from hearing and it has a complex process which consists of four steps: receiving, attending, understanding, and responding. Kline explains that hearing is a part of listening process that only deals with sound perception, in which people do not make attempt to glean for the meaning. While in listening, the listener tries to obtain the meaning of the information that they hear. Overall, there are two similar points from the mentioned definitions about listening: listening involves an effort to find the