The Importance Of Listening In A Foreign Language

Listening activity is our day-to-day- routines. We do listening activities most of our time in our daily communication. As Goh (2002:1) argued that listening takes up at least 50% of our time in everyday communication. Listening skill, especially in English as major world language, is very important in our attempt to maintain relationship with other and to survive. In the past, listening skill was regarded as secondary skill. It was treated not as important as reading or writing. As a result, students’ performance in listening is poor.
Listening in a foreign language is perhaps the most difficult skills for learners to develop. This is due to the fact that listening activities require wide range of things such as the familiarity of the sound,

Most of us will agree that listening play a very significant part in our everyday communication. Through listening, we internalize information which is called linguistics information. This information enables us to produce language. In classrooms, students always do more listening than speaking. Listening competence is universally "larger" than speaking competence. However, the importance of listening has long been ignored by language teachers or language specialist all over the world. The skill got proportional attention only when James Asher proposed his Total Physical Response technique in 70s (Brown, 2001: 53). Since that time on listening has been given decent portion in the process of language

Or even if it was taught it was taught only as complement to speaking or reading. As a result the students’ performances on listening skill are still poor. This situation has led some language specialists to create more modern method to teach listening based on the current and new view on listening.
Current Views on the Issue of Listening and Its Teaching
Current view on listening is influenced by failure of the teaching of listening in language classroom. Specifically the current view on listening is influenced by the rise of communicative language teaching. Communicative language teaching is view language teaching as giving communicative competence to learners, not only grammatical competence as the earlier view held Richard (2005: 2).
It is based on these views that listening is now taught with more modern beliefs such as listening using bottom-up processing model and listening using top-down processing model.
In short if trace back the teaching of listening as we see now practiced in the language classroom has shifted from earlier view to more modern