Jumat, 07 Januari 2011 Is listening skill an ‘isolated skill’? Diposting oleh an.pane di 18.49

When we hear about ‘listening practice in school’, perhaps we will remember how teachers carry a radio and a cassette to a class. Now, there are many schools in big cities that provide computers to be used for learning process. Here, the teachers use audio CD, recording, or any software to teach listening skill for the students. Despite the modern facilities now, the way how listening practice adapted in schools is still the same: teachers distribute pieces of paper containing some questions then assign the students to answer them individually based on what they listen from the audio.  Can we use listening practice to teach other language skills beside listening skill itself?

Let’s look at this example:

Students in a classroom are listening to a recording about two people watching a movie on television. Those two people have different opinion about the characters in that movie.

From this recording, the teacher can ask the students to take notes about what they have listened to. Instead of providing some questions on the answer sheet, the teacher can ask the students to work in pairs and take the roles of those people in the recording. They can decide who become who. Then, they make their own scenario with their own words. After that, they can act while the teacher is walking around the class to see how accurate the scenario is compare to the recording and how fluent the students speak.

When they are done, the teacher can play the recording once again and ask the students to listen to it. The teachers can make a class discussion by asking about their opinion, the difficulties they find, and what they feel when they work in pairs using their own scenario.

We can see that listening practice become ‘a hook’ in this activity. Besides teaching listening skill to students, the teacher here is also able to train students’ writing skill (by making a scenario), speaking skill (through the dialogue and discussion), and also build interactivity between student and student, and also students and teacher.
Beside using audio or recording, teachers can also show a video as a listening source for the students. Then, the activity could be the same as the one above (e.g. making a scenario, dialogue, etc). Now, let's watch this video as an example!

So, what do you think about the activity like this?Can we use a video like that to conduct the activity? Do you think there are some barriers to conduct this activity in Indonesian schools?

Listening Skill in Language Learning Diposting oleh an.pane di 18.42

taken from google images

Looking at my experience in school observation, I saw how listening and speaking skill are important. It was clear when I had to interview some students and asked them some questions about their product. In this article, I want to focus on listening skill. However, listening is often followed by speaking. It is supported by Krashen’s (1982) ideas about comprehensible input, where a language learner gets the input from others (by listening) then produce what he/she learn from others (by speaking). That is why listening became a foundation for speaking.

Nunan (1989) says that listening has two views which exist in language pedagogy; they are bottom up view and top-down view. Bottom-up view assumes that listening is a process of decoding the sounds, from the smallest meaningful units (phonemes) to complete texts. Let’s take a look one example:

Goal: find the stressed syllables

Example: Listen to words of two or three syllables. Mark them for the word stress and predict the pronunciation of the unstressed syllable.

On the other hand, top-down emphasizes on how listeners actively construct the original meaning of the speaker. Here, the listeners use prior knowledge of the context to make them understand about what they hear, for example:

Goal: Listen to identify the topic

Example: Listen to a radio commercial. On the answer sheet, choose among four types of product and identify the picture that goes with it.

It is very important to combine those two views and use them in Indonesian schools. However, in my opinion, Bottom-up view is rarely used in Indonesian schools while the top-down is more often. Considering it as the basic view, I think it should be used in all levels even started from the beginner level.  It is important for our speaking skill too. In fact, when I was in school, I never studied materials which used Bottom-up view, such as learning about minimal pairs. It was easier for me to find the exercise using top-down view.  I think it is because many people or teachers see bottom-up view as a simple view which can be ‘ignored’ in language learning process. I do not agree with this assumption because those two views are related and should be combined together.

What do you think about these two views? :)